Significant happenings in the world of geophysical FOSS1 this month as upstart Madagascar hits V1.0 and a 3.0 revamp is planned for the venerable Seismic Un*x. Madagascar 1.0 was announced at this month’s Madagascar School of Reproducible Computational Geophysics event where it was described as a big event in Madagascar’s history, the first stable version of the tool. Madagascar is more than seismic processing as it delves into the realm of multidimensional data analysis and reproducible computational experiments.
We asked Madagascar founder and lead developer Sergey Formel for an explanation. He said, ‘Madagascar is not tied to seismic and has been used on other multidimensional data such as geostatistics [notably by Shell’s Jim Jennings] and reservoir modeling. ‘Reproducibility’ is not a goal in itself, just a path to productivity, collaboration and technology transfer from research to production. In my opinion, all scientific software should adopt some form of reproducibility if it wants to evolve technologically.’ Madagascar has seen 10,000 downloads to date. Speakers at the Madagascar School hailed from KAUST University, Saudi Arabia, University of Texas at Austin, BP and the Center for Wave Phenomena (CWP) at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM). More from www.reproducibility.org.
The CWP is also home to John Stockwell’s SU project. SU has been installed in more than 3,300 sites world-wide in 68 countries. A revamp is under consideration, provisionally dubbed ‘S3,’ that will likely develop in parallel to SU, and will be delivered under a GNU license (the current SU is ‘owned’ by the CWP) and which will embed the GNU scientific library codes in what is planned as ‘SU for the 21st century.’ More from www.oilit.com/links/1007_5.
1 Free and Open Source Software.
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