[kepler-users] Kepler 2.0 Released

[Derik Barseghian]

The Kepler Project is pleased to announce the availability of Kepler  
2.0 (https://kepler-project.org/users/downloads ), a major update to  
the Kepler scientific workflow system. Representing the combined  
efforts of numerous individuals and projects, Kepler is a user- 
friendly, open-source application for analyzing, modeling, and sharing  
scientific data and analytical processes.

The Kepler scientific workflow system (http://kepler-project.org ) is  
designed to help scientists as well as analysts and computer  
programmers build models for executing analyses and running scientific  
models. Scientific workflows are a mechanism to specify and  
orchestrate the execution of scientific processes that span many  
different analytical systems and data repositories.  Kepler can  
analyze data stored in a variety of formats with software components  
drawn from many different systems. For example, Kepler supports models  
in R, Matlab, and other common environments, and allows scientists to  
design analyses that utilize the strengths of each of these systems.   
By providing a sound infrastructure that permits users to easily  
integrate a wide diversity of data and analytical components, Kepler  
not only facilitates the execution of a specific analysis, but also  
helps users share and reuse data, workflows, and components developed  
by the community to address common problems. Kepler workflows have  
been used to study the effect of climate change on species  
distribution, to simulate supernova explosions, to identify  
transcription factors, and to perform statistical analyses. The  
variety of applications is as broad as today's exciting range of  
scientific studies.

Kepler 2.0 builds upon earlier releases by adding in several key new  
capabilities. Foremost, we have redesigned the underlying Kepler  
system to be a modular system that is easily extensible with add-on  
modules that can be developed independently of the main system.   
Module developers might define a new suite of components that handle a  
specific type of disciplinary computation, extend the Kepler framework  
to add new user interfaces, or add in new data access capabilities.  
Over the next few weeks we expect to see several new modules released  
and available for download through the new Kepler Module Manager  
(accessible from the Tools menu), including a reporting system,  
workflow run manager, and enhancements to the distributed execution  
system.

Other enhancements were made in Kepler 2.0, including major  
improvements to the provenance tracking system for workflow runs,  
improved consistency of the user interface on Mac OS X, a new Workflow  
Outline tab, new actors for accessing sensor data (e.g. DataTurbine)  
and other data repositories (e.g., OPeNDAP), and numerous stability  
improvements.  For developers, we have also added several new  
extension points allowing developers to add new tabs and views in  
their modules, to be able to serialize results and other artifacts  
into Kepler Archive (kar) files, and the ability to interact with the  
remote Kepler repository to save and share workflows.  Finally, we  
have completely redesigned the build system to support the new modules  
system and allow community contributions to the system.

Kepler is an open source project that is the result of many  
contributors to the Kepler system (https://kepler-project.org/developers/kepler-contributors 
  ). We are committed to the continued open development and  
maintenance of the Kepler system, and users are encouraged to  
contribute to the product by suggesting features that would be of use  
or by actively participating in development by contributing modules or  
components.

The Kepler collaboration was originally founded in 2002 by researchers  
at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)  
at University of California Santa Barbara, the San Diego Supercomputer  
Center (SDSC) at University of California San Diego, and the  
University of California Davis as part of the Science Environment for  
Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) and Scientific Data Management (SDM)  
projects. It has since grown to include contributors from scores of  
research projects in many science disciplines, including ecology,  
biology, geosciences, physics, engineering, and chemistry, among  
others. The Kepler software extends the Ptolemy II system (http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ 
  ) developed by researchers at the University of California Berkeley,  
which provides a mature platform for building and executing workflows,  
and supports multiple models of computation.

Kepler is available under the BSD License. To download the  
application, please go to the Kepler downloads page (https://kepler-project.org/users/downloads 
  ).