Editing GSOC2009 (section)

=Welcome to Madagascar's Google Summer of Code Page=

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[http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2009/faqs.html Google Summer of Code] is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. 
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[[Image:2009socwithlogo.gif‎ |frame|right|[http://code.google.com/soc/ Google Summer of Code]]]

Madagascar, an open source project, is a leading participant in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_research Open Research movement]. As described on Wikipedia, the central theme of open research is to make clear accounts of the methodology, along with data and results extracted therefrom, freely available via the internet. This permits a massively distributed collaboration.

Its design is based on a few simple and powerful principles.

From the coder's point of view, Madagascar is written in C and in Python. The C library is a very loosely coupled set of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_(Unix) unix-style filters], transforming stdin to stdout. The Python is mostly an implementation of a custom build system on top of the rule based build system [http://www.scons.org/ SCons]. 

Seismic data processing consists of a sequence of steps. Madagascar's filter-based design allows such sequences to be easily composed and abstracted. A key advantage of the Madagascar system is that the computational pipeline is also construed as a build system. Modifications to intermediate steps automatically reinvoke only necessary computations and skip over up-to-date ones, just as a more conventional build system would recompile modules whose code had been touched while reusing modules which are newer than their source. Madagascar extends this model all the way from raw data to publication.

This strategy is a key to [http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/mags/cs/2009/01/mcs2009010005.pdf reproducibility]. By maintaining scripts which contain all transformations from raw data to final publication quality document, Madagascar supports repeatability and testing of scientific computations, thus advancing the collaborative nature of science in the same way that open source advances the collaborative nature of computing.

Directions in which Madagascar is expanding include visualization, parallelization, and user interfaces.