Café con leche

At the weekend, 28 digital geoscientists gathered at MAZ Café in Santa Ana, California, to sprint on some open geophysics software projects. Teams and individuals pushed pull requests — code contributions to open source projects — left, right, and centre. Meanwhile, Senah and her team at MAZ kept us plied with coffee and horchata, with fantastic food on the side.

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Because people were helping each other and contributing where they could, I found it a bit hard to stay on top of what everyone was working on. But here are some of the things I heard at the project breakdown on Sunday afternoon:

Gerard Gorman, Navjot Kukreja, Fabio Luporini, Mathias Louboutin, and Philipp Witte, all from the devito project, continued their work to bring Kubernetes cluster management to devito. Trying to balance ease of use and unlimited compute turns out to be A Hard Problem! They also supported the other teams hacking on devito.

Thibaut Astic (UBC) worked on implementing DC resistivity models in devito. He said he enjoyed the expressiveness of devito’s symbolic equation definitions, but that there were some challenges with implementing the grad, div, and curl operator matrices for EM.

Vitor Mickus and Lucas Cavalcante (Campinas) continued their work implementing a CUDA framework for devito. Again, all part of the devito project trying to give scientists easy ways to scale to production-scale datasets.

That wasn’t all for devito. Alongside all these projects, Stephen Alwon worked on adapting segyio to read shot records, Robert Walker worked on poro-elastic models for devito, and Mohammed Yadecuri and Justin Clark (California Resources) contributed too. On the second day, the devito team was joined by Felix Hermann (now Georgia Tech), with Mengmeng Yang, and Ali Siakoohi (both UBC). Clearly there’s something to this technology!

Brendon Hall and Ben Lasscock (Enthought) hacked on an open data portal concept, based on the UCI Machine Learning Repository, coincidentally based just down the road from our location. The team successfully got some examples of open data and code snippets working.

Jesper Dramsch (Heriot-Watt), Matteo Niccoli (MyCarta), Yuriy Ivanov (NTNU) and Adriana Gordon and Volodymyr Vragov (U Calgary), hacked on bruges for the weekend, mostly on its documentation and the example notebooks in the in-bruges project. Yuriy got started on a ray-tracing code for us.

Nathan Jones (California Resources) and Vegard Hagen (NTNU) did some great hacking on an interactive plotting framework for geoscience data, based on Altair. What they did looked really polished and will definitely come in useful at future hackathons.

All in all, an amazing array of projects!

This event was low-key compared to recent hackathons, and I enjoyed the slightly more relaxed atmosphere. The venue was also incredibly supportive, making my life very easy.

A big thank you as always to our sponsors, Dell EMC and Enthought. The presence of the irrepressible David Holmes and Chris Lenzsch (both Dell EMC), and Enthought’s new VP of Energy, Charlie Cosad, was greatly appreciated.

We will definitely be revisiting the sprint concept in the future — einmal ist keinmal, as they say. Devito and bruges both got a boost from the weekend, and I think all the developers did too. So stay tuned for the next edition!

What is a sprint?

In October we're hosting our first 'code sprint'! What is that?

A code sprint is a type of hackathon, in which efforts are focused around a small number of open source projects. They are related to, but not really the same as, sprints in the Scrum software development framework. They are non-competitive — the only goal is to improve the software in question, whether it's adding functionality, fixing bugs, writing tests, improving documentation, or doing any of the other countless things that good software needs. 

On 13 and 14 October, we'll be hacking on 3 projects:

• Devito: a high-level finite difference library for Python. Devito featured in three Geophysical Tutorials at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 (see Witte et al. for Part 3). The project needs help with code, tests, model examples, and documentation. There will be core devs from the project at the sprint. GitHub repo is here.
• Bruges: a simple collection of Python functions representing basic geophysical equations. We built this library back in 2015, and have been chipping away ever since. It needs more equations, better docs, and better tests — and the project is basic enough for anyone to contribute to it, even a total Python newbie. GitHub repo is here.
• G3.js: a JavaScript wrapper for D3.js, a popular plotting toolkit for web developers. When we tried to adapt D3.js to geoscience data, we found we wanted to simplify basic tasks like making vertical plots, and plotting raster-like data (e.g. seismic) with line plots on top (e.g. horizons). Experience with JavaScript is a must. GitHub repo is here.

The sprint will be at a small joint called MAZ Café Con Leche, located in Santa Ana about 10 km or 15 minutes from the Anaheim Convention Center where the SEG Annual Meeting is happening the following week.

Thank you, as ever, to our fantastic sponsors: Dell EMC and Enthought. These two companies are powered by amazing people doing amazing things. I'm very grateful to them both for being such enthusiastic champions of the change we're working for in our science and our industry. 

If you like the sound of spending the weekend coding, talking geophysics, and enjoying the best coffee in southern California, please join us at the Geophysics Sprint! Register on Eventbrite and we'll see you there.