Introducing Project January

A new project proposal from the Eclipse Science Working Group (SWG) goes live. Project January aims to provide a set of standardized Java-based numerical data structures for scientific computing. Scientific tools are rapidly scaling to meet the increasing demands of the user both in sheer volumes of data as well as complexity. Back at a site meeting in Trondheim, the SWG members agreed a generic dataset that would promote tool integration was one of the key priorities of the group. In the short-term, this looks a lot like “numpy for Java”. That in itself is a pretty big deal, but the future plans are equally exciting, check out the proposal here.

As for the name, project January works on many levels. Besides being the month the project proposal goes live, it is also an acronym: JAva NUmerical ARraYs :-). The month January is named after the Roman god Janus, god of new beginnings and doorways. Project January is a foundational building block of scientific computing and certainly a doorway to greater collaboration and tool integration within the Eclipse community and beyond.