Dask was awarded funding last year in round 2 of the CZI Essential Open Source Software grant program.That funding was used to hire Genevieve Buckley to work on Dask with a focus on life sciences.Last month Dask submitted an interim progress report to CZI, covering the period from February to September 2021.That progress update is published verbatim below, to share with the wider Dask community.
The scope of work performed by the Dask fellow includes code contributions, conference presentations and tutorials, community engagement, and outreach including blogposts.
The primary deliverable of this proposal is consistency and the success of neighboring softwareprojects
Project work to date includes:
Code contributions are not limiteed to the main Dask repository, but also neighbouring software projects which use Dask as well (like the napari software project), including: dask, dask-image, dask-examples, napari, & napari.github.io.
To date, across the five repositories named above the Dask fellow has contributed:
The Dask fellow is an official maintainer of the dask-image project, and additional milestones achieved for that project include:
Highlights include:
Bugfixes benefitting the broader community
Expanded GPU support
Visualization tools benefitting all Dask users
High Level Graphs
Memory improvements (ongoing)
Notable conference events in 2021 included the SciPy conference, the Dask Summit, and VIS2021.
The Dask fellow presented a talk titled “Scaling Science: leveraging Dask for life sciences” at the 2021 SciPy conference. Full recording available here.
The Dask fellow organised two workshops at the 2021 Dask Summit:
The scope of Dask Down Under was more like a mini-conference for Australian timezones, rather than a typical workshop. Dask Down Under involved two days of events, covering:
It was very well recieved by the community. A full report on the Dask Down under events is available here. A YouTube playlist of the Dask Down Under events is available here on the Dask YouTube channel.
The Dask life science workshop involved:
A full report on the Dask life science workshop is available here. A YouTube playlist of all the Dask life science lightning talks is available here on the Dask YouTube channel.
The Dask fellow was an invited panellist at the VIS2021 symposium in February 2021. The “Problem Solver” panel discussion covered practical problems in image analysis and how tools like Dask and napari can help solve them.
The Dask fellow co-presented a half-day workshop (five hours) at the 2021 Light Microscopy Australia Meeting with Juan Nunez-Iglesias. napari is an open source multidimensional image viewer built using Dask for out-of-core image processing. Workshop content is available at this link: https://github.com/jni/lma-2021-bioimage-analysis-python/
Upcoming workshop:The Dask fellow has been invited to deliver a workshop on napari and big data using Dask at an upcoming NEUBIAS Academy. Workshop content is available at this link: https://github.com/GenevieveBuckley/napari-big-data-training
The Dask fellow supervised a Google Summer of Code student in 2021. Martin Durant acted as a secondary supervisor. The project ran over a 3 month period, and involved implementing a number of features to improve visualization of Dask graphs and objects. A full report on the Dask GSOC project is available here.
We set a goal of one blogpost per month, and exceeded it. To date, nine blogposts have been published by the Dask fellow, with another two currently in draft status.
Draft status, will be published soon:
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