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.

The 1.4 stable release features 5 new reproducible papers and multiple other enhancements. The main new feature is the addition of the IWAVE modeling package from Bill Symes and The Rice Inversion Project.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous 1.3 stable distribution (released six months ago) has been downloaded more than 2,000 times. The total number of Madagascar downloads has reached 20,000. According to Ohloh.net, the year before 1.4 release was the period of record development activity, with 27 contributors (up 35% compared to the previous year) making 1,500 commits to the repository (up 70%). Ohloh.net says that Madagascar “has a well established, mature codebase maintained by a large development team with increasing year-over-year commits” and estimated 125 man-years of effort.

The Madagascar school in Austin took place on July 20-21 and was hosted by the Bureau of Economic Geology. More than 40 people attended, representing 15 organizations (11 universities and 4 companies) from 5 different countries. The school materials are available now on the website.

The following Madagascar-related meetings are taking place this summer. Workshop 16 at the 2012 EAGE Annul Meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, is titled Open-source E+P Software – Six Years Later and scheduled on Friday, June 8. The title refers to an analogous workshop in Vienna in 2006, where Madagascar was first publicly announced. The workshop is organized by Joseph Dellinger, Karl Schleicher, Helene Huck, and Tariq Alkhalifah and features an extensive program with multiple presentations. This year’s Madagascar School and Workshop will take place in Austin, Texas, on Friday-Saturday July 20-21. Please reserve the date and wait for the announcement of the program and registration details.

The 1.3 stable release features 7 new reproducible papers, multiple bug fixes, and a tutorial by Jeff Godwin.

According to the SourceForge statistics, the previous 1.2 stable release has been downloaded nearly 4,000 times, with more than 1,000 downloads in China. During the same period, there have been 41,028 read transactions and 994 write transactions in the Subversion repository. Ohloh.net characterizes Madagascar by a “mature, well-established codebase” and a “large, active development team“, the estimated project cost is $7,4 million.

The Madagascar school in Beijing was a blast! Many thanks to Yibo Wang and Yang Liu (x 2) for the excellent organization and tremendous hospitality. Nearly 230 people attended, representing 12 Chinese universities, 5 companies, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The school materials are available now on the website.

The 1.2 release features 7 new reproducible papers, multiple bug fixes, and structural changes in the installation directories. In the first half of this year, according to the SourceForge statistics, stable versions have been dowloaded 1,859 times. During the same period, there have been 2,681 read transactions and 491 write transactions in the Subversion repository. According to Ohloh, the estimated project cost has exceeded $5 million.

The 1.1 release features 12 new reproducible papers, multiple bug fixes, and a Graphical User Interface (thanks to Jeff Godwin). The cumulative number of all previous stable-release downloads has exceeded 12,000.

The July 2010 School and Workshop in Houston went well and attracted more than 50 people, about half of them being graduate students. About 10 companies and 12 universities were represented. The event was sponsored by the Petroleum Technology Transfer Council. All presentation materials from the workshop are now available on the website.