I'm glad I chose Python for Sage -- some cool scientific computing Python projects

When brainstorming for talk ideas for a workshop, Fernando Perez came up with a bunch of random off-the-top of his head very high quality/impact scientific computing projects that involve Python. Here they are (the following was written by Fernando Perez, the author of IPython):

- I can obviously talk about ipython and related projects, but I can also give a math/technical talk off this type of work (the whole implementation is python, and uses quite a few tricks):

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acha.2007.08.001

- Brian Granger (from Tech-X http://txcorp.org) has a NASA grant to develop distributed arrays for Python, using IPython and numpy. That would make for an excellent talk, I think (matlab, interactivesupercomputing.com, and all the 'big boys' are after distributed arrays).

- Trilinos (http://trilinos.sandia.gov), a large set of parallel solvers developed at Sandia National Lab, has a great set of Python bindings (even usable interactively via ipython).

- MPI4Py is an excellent set of MPI bindings for Python, and its author Lisandro Dalcin is also the developer of Petsc4py:
* http://mpi4py.scipy.org/
* http://code.google.com/p/petsc4py/
If Lisandro can't come, I can contact one of the Petsc guys who's a great python developer and see if he's coming or can make it, he's an excellent speaker (Matt Knepley from Argonne Nat. Lab http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~knepley/).

- The Hubble space telescope people are all pyhton based, and have done enormous amounts of work on both their internal image processing pipeline and contrbuting to Matplotlib (they have currently a developer working full time on matplotlib).

- The NetworkX (Sage uses this) guys from Los Alamos will probably be coming: https://networkx.lanl.gov/wiki.

- The Scripps institute has an extremely strong Python team doing molecular visualization and visual programming. Their work is very impressive, and they're already in San Diego, so it's a no brainer to attend. Their presentations are always of very high quality: http://mgltools.scripps.edu.

- JPL uses python extensively (they've contracted out work for matplotlib to be extended to suit their specific needs).

- My new job at UC Berkeley is on neuroscience, and we could present the work that's being developed there for fMRI analysis (all Python based, fully open source, NIH funded).

- Andrew Straw's work (http://www.its.caltech.edu/~astraw/) on real-time 3d tracking of fruit flies is very, very impressive. All python based, hardware control, real-time parallel computing.

- The CACR group at Caltech has the contract for DANSE (http://wiki.cacr.caltech.edu/danse/index.php/Main_Page), the Spallation Neutron Source's data analysis framework, all python. This is currently the largest experiment being funded in the USA.