By integrating or updating best practices, embracing emerging technologies (Docker containers, Conda packages, …), by decoupling components and sharing infrastructure, we managed to make OpenDreamKit components available and interoperable in a much wider range of environments. Notable success stories are:
- Porting of the components to Windows, MacOS and Linux;
- Distribution of the components through official package repositories for major Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo);
- Distribution of Docker images and Conda packages suited for deployment of our components in cloud environments;
- Porting of SageMath to Python 3;
- Modularization of various OpenDreamKit components, in particular SageMath and GAP.
This was reinforced by tuning computational software to deliver high performance on modern computing platforms ranging from personal laptops to HPC clusters.
We contributed to a tight integration of OpenDreamKit components with Jupyter, and to the Jupyter ecosystem itself, notably around collaboration, validation, interactive web pages, 3D visualisation, interactive mathematics, and collaborative workspaces.
To assess and demonstrate the applicability of our technology well beyond mathematics, we integrated micromagnetism computational engines into Jupyter to deliver a VRE taylored for interactive micromagnetism. We also used ourselves extensively all the elements of the OpenDreamKit for research, teaching, training, authoring interactive textbooks material, and much more, in a variety of fields ranging from biology to computer science, all using Jupyter technology. The outcome was immediately fed back into the project development.
Finally we explored novel knowledge-based approaches for the high-level integration of large stacks of mathematical components. Like an interpreter for human language, it ensures meaning-preserving communication in mathematical languages between computation systems, databases, and humans. Concrete outcomes for bridging the gap between computation and data are already in production for data generation, online data exploration and live data exploration.
In addition, community building, training, and dissemination activities have been at the forefront of OpenDreamKit, with more than one hundred events organized or co-organized by OpenDreamKit, including developer workshops, training conferences, or satellite sessions, adding up to 1800 trainees. We also actively promoted diversity, through dedicated actions aimed at women and residents of developing countries. We also created resources for researchers and teachers to accompany them in their use of the technologies we promote, such as tutorials, explainer comics and short videos. This includes contributions to the open textbook Computational Mathematics with SageMath which is nowadays reaching 500 downloads per day.
