Copy-editing of the NASA grant blog post

Author: rgommers

apps/labs/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020.md

@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+---
+title: 'NASA ROSES E7 Grant: Reinforcing the Fondations of Scientific Python'
+author: matti-picus
+published: Aug 10, 2022
+description: 'Announcing a 3-year program to improve NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and scikit-learn'
+category: [Funding]
+featuredImage:
+  src: /posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/scientific_python_ecosystem.png
+  alt: 'River of scientific python projects, flowing from Python and NumPy, to
+    Foundational projects, to technique-specific projects, to domain-specific
+    projects, to applications.'
+hero:
+  src: /posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/scientific_python_ecosystem.png
+  alt: 'River of scientific python projects, flowing from Python and Numpy, to
+    Foundational projects, to technique-specific projects, to domain-specific
+    projects, to applications.'
+---
+
+### Announcement of the grant being awarded
+
+We are happy and proud to announce that the [NASA ROSES 2020](https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/grant-solicitations/roses-2020/release-research-opportunities-space-and-earth-science-roses-2020)
+program, specifically the [Support for Open Source Tools, Frameworks and Libraries](https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary.do?solId=%7B958CF134-D655-E512-B5AD-84501D14A0C1%7D&path=&method=init)
+component, has accepted [a
+proposal](/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/NASA_project_proposal.pdf)
+from the scientific Python community. The
+[selection](https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument?cmdocumentid=843923&solicitationId={958CF134-D655-E512-B5AD-84501D14A0C1}&viewSolicitationDocument=1)
+is for a 3-year, $385,385 per year grant, which will be split between the participating
+projects: [scikit-learn](https://scikit-learn.org),
+[pandas](https://pandas.org/), [SciPy](https://scipy.org/) and
+[NumPy](https://numpy.org/).
+
+### Backstory
+
+Once the NASA ROSES funding proposal opened, the working group began creating a
+proposal that answered the conditions of the program. The proposal was based on
+an earlier
+[rejected NSF proposal](https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Mid-Scale_Research_Infrastructure_-_The_Scientific_Python_Ecosystem/8009441).
+Many of the authors of the NSF proposal were also involved in the successful
+NASA ROSES proposal. The process of pulling the proposal together: laying out
+the scope of the program, splitting the grant writing into sections, and
+overall cooperation between the groups was in and of itself helpful to get many
+of the people at the core of scientific Python together.
+
+### Deliverables
+
+This [Gantt chart](/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/NASA_project_workplan.pdf)
+summarizes the primary deliverables of the project:
+
+- Ongoing work with issue triaging & code review, maintenance, CI & packaging
+  improvements
+- Creating a joint infrastructure for running benchmarks and create both
+  micro-benchmarks and more general benchmarks for the projects
+- Use NumPy's new dtype infrastructure to create a flexible Unicode string
+  type, and integrate that into pandas
+- More NumPy SIMD performance improvements
+- Move forward with Array API Standard adoption
+- Extend the use of Numba UDFs in pandas
+- Optimize pandas' memory usage, and implement Cython performance optimizations
+  in sckit-learn
+- Add support for CuPy and Dask to SciPy and scikit-learn via the Array API
+  standard
+- Add a framework for parallelization to SciPy
+- Add large-scale optimization routines to SciPy
+
+The goals are quite ambitious given the amount of funding. They leverage
+synergy between the projects and underlying standards to move the entire
+scientific Python community forward.
+
+### Who will be doing the work
+
+The work will be executed by a mix of experienced maintainers and new talent
+recruited specifically for the project. Due to restrictions from the funders,
+research (which includes most or all work on new features) will be primarily
+executed by people in the United States, while the international team will take
+on the engineering and contributor tasks. Some of the work will be
+subcontracted to LANL and Cal Poly.
+
+The grant will be administered via a committee. Dharhas Pothina, Quansight's CTO,
+is the PI. Leaders of the participating projects will advise and monitor
+activities and changes in scope to make sure they are aligned with what the
+projects need most.
+
+### Final thoughts
+
+This is a significant milestone in the growing stream of funding flowing
+towards community-driven Open Source - and to scientific Python projects in
+particular. The grant is one of the first to specifically fund cross-project
+collaboration, in a way that will leverage common interests toward improving
+the entire ecosystem. Institutional funders are realizing that we are indeed a
+web of interlinked projects supported by a community of contributors, and we
+are thankful to NASA for the opportunity to spearhead this new model.
+
+We'll provide updates in future blog posts as well as on the mailing lists of
+the project involved as we achieve significant progress toward the goals of the
+grants.
+
+These are exciting times, funding for core PyData projects is accelerating.