An open-source software project called Zarr has been announced as a funding recipient from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).
The project was founded by Alistair Miles and has grown to include contributors from diverse academic and commercial organisations. It provides a general-purpose solution for storage and retrieval of large scientific data sets, and was originally developed for use with large genetic datasets, but it has been taken up and used in other scientific domains, including climate modelling, Earth observation and microscopy.
The project was awarded a $200,000 one year grant from the CZI Essential Open Source Software programme. On receiving the funding, Alistair said, 'Open source software has become part of the fabric of modern science, we simply couldn't live without it. CZI's funding provides a much-needed boost for the essential work of developing and maintaining these software tools. We're extremely grateful to receive support for Zarr, which is enabling us to deal with the ever-growing volumes of scientific data being analysed at the BDI'.