Registration is open for Madagascar’s Second Working Workshop.

As a reminder, Working Workshops as opposed to “talking workshops” are meetings where the participants work together (possibly divided into pairs or small teams) to develop new software code or to conduct computational experiments addressing a particular problem. The First Working Workshop took place last summer in Austin. This year’s workshop will take place on at Rice University in Houston, Texas, on July 31 – August 2, 2014. The topic of this year’s workshop is parallel and high-performance computing. The objective is

1. To develop convenient tools for high-performance and parallel computing.
2. To create new examples of distributed-memory and shared-memory parallel computing.
3. To explore hardware-accelerated parallel computing (NVIDIA GPU and Intel® Xeon Phi™).

Registration is free by an application is required. If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please fill an application form.

The 1.6 stable release features fifteen new reproducible papers and multiple other enhancements including the addition of the seismic migration gallery.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous 1.5 stable distribution has been downloaded more than 5,000 times. The record number of downloads in September 2013 is probably due to the fact that Madagascar is being used for teaching at different universities. The top country (with 40% of all downloads) was China, followed by the US, Brazil, Mexico, and Australia.

According to Ohloh.net, the year before the 1.6 release was the period of a high development activity, with 41 contributors (up 41% compared to the previous year) making 1,762 commits to the repository. Ohloh.net says that Madagascar “has a well established, mature codebase maintained by a very large development team with stable year-over-year commits” and estimated 201 man-years of effort.

A Madagascar school will take place on April 11, 2014, in St. Petersburg, Russia, at a workshop during the EAGE convention. The workshop was proposed by Paul Sava.

See the workshop page for more information.

Australia’s population is smaller than the population of Texas, yet Australia’s surface area is more than ten times larger than Texas. Australia is not only one of the top ten countries by proven natural gas reserves (the full list is Iran, Russia, Qatar, Turkmenistan, USA, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, Australia) but also one of the top ten countries in visits to the Madagascar website (the full list is USA, China, Canada, UK, Brazil, Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, France, Australia).

The Madagascar school in Melbourne, Australia, took place on August 15 and was organized by Jeff Shragge from UWA as a workshop at the 2013 ASEG-PESA meeting. The school attracted nearly 20 participants who listened to presentations and worked through interactive exercises. Jan Stellingwerff from dGB demonstrated the Madagascar interface in OpendTect. The school materials are available now on the website.

An unusual experiment in collaborative reproducible research took place in Austin, Texas, on July 25-27: 25 participants from 9 different organizations gathered at the Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin for the First Madagascar Working Workshop. The participants divided into 10 teams of 2-3 people by pairing experienced Madagascar developers with novice users. Each team worked on a small project, updating either reproducible papers or entries in the migration gallery. At the conclusion of the meeting, the participants discussed their experience and plans for future workshops.

The 1.5 stable release features nine new reproducible papers and multiple other enhancements including the addition of the RVL (Rice Vector Library) and IWAVE++ full waveform inversion packages from Bill Symes and The Rice Inversion Project.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous 1.4 stable distribution has been downloaded more than 3,000 times. The total number of Madagascar downloads is approaching 25,000. According to Ohloh.net,, the year before 1.5 release was the period of a record development activity, with 32 contributors (up 33% compared to the previous year) making 1,570 commits to the repository (up 35%). Ohloh.net says that Madagascar “has a well established, mature codebase maintained by a very large development team with increasing year-over-year commits” and estimated 167 man-years of effort.

A Madagascar School will take place on August 15, 2013, in Melbourne, Australia, during the ASEG convention and is organized by Jeff Shragge from the University of Western Australia.

In addition, the First Madagascar Working Workshop will take place on July 25-27, 2013, in Austin, Texas. The declared objectives of the workshop are

1. To expand Madagascar’s collection of reproducible papers. New reproducible papers may include papers written using Madagascar programs as well as papers written using other open-source software tools.
2. To create and expand a seismic migration gallery. Migration gallery is a matrix where rows are different benchmark datasets and columns are different seismic migration algorithms.

If you are interested in participating in this event, please apply for a registration by following the link at https://www.ahay.org/wiki/Austin_2013. The application deadline is July 1.

On March 23, Fernando Perez, the creator of IPython, received the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. The award was presented by Richard Stallman, the president of the Free Software Foundation, at a ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

IPython plays well with Madagascar through the use of the Python interface. A particularly convenient way of using IPython’s interactive capabilities is the web-based notebook interface.

We can expect new enhancements to IPython’s notebook interface from Fernando Perez and his collaborators thanks to a generous grant from the Sloan foundation.

The official birthday of the Madagascar project is June 11, 2006, when the project was first publicly announced. However, the initial work on the project (called RSF at the time) started sometime in early 2003, 10 years ago.

The age of a car is usually measured in miles, not years. Similarly, the age of an open-source project is best measured in the number of revisions and commits to the repository. Madagascar revision number 10,000 happened yesterday! The author of the anniversary revision, Professor William Symes from Rice University will receive a commemorative Madagascar stein. According to Ohloh, the number of commits to the Madagascar repository has increased by 63% in the last 12 months, and the number of contributors during the same period has increased from 21 to 27.

A Winter School on Reproducible Science And Modern Scientific Software, the first of its kind, took place in Norway on January 20-25, 2013, and was organized by SINTEF.

Abstract: A major problem with the computational science community today is that many publications are impossible to reproduce. Results published in a paper are seldom accompanied by the source code used to produce these results. Even when the source code is available the published results can only be reproduced if run the code is compiled with a specific compiler and run on a specific architecture using a specific set of parameters. Reproducibility aims to make the process of publishing reproducible science as simple as possible, and it has gained a lot of momentum as a desirable principle of the scientific method. Tightly coupled with reproducible science is modern software development. Tools and methodologies including version control, unit testing, verification and validation, and continuous integration make the process of publishing reproducible science much simpler. The winter school will give an introduction to the state-of-the-art in reproducible science and modern scientific software development. The aim is that participants will be able to apply the learned techniques to their own research. Topics that will be covered include reproducible research, verification and validation, software testing, and continuous integration.

Lectures were given by Rasmus Benestad, Andre Brodtkorb, Fernando Perez, and Johan Seland. The school program with supplemental materials is now available on the web.