About¶
The Experimental Development Team (Xdev) in the Computational & Information Systems Lab (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is a small team dedicated to the development of open source analysis technologies for the weather and climate communities. Xdev is located in the Technology Development Division (TDD) of CISL and within the Visualization and Analysis Software Team (VAST) of TDD.
Primarily, Xdev is focused on addressing usability issues with the existing open source Python stack, primarily addressing limitations and adding new features and technologies to make the use of Python for data analysis in the weather and climate communities as powerful and effective as it can be. We want to improve our community scientists’ “time to solution,” but we exist because we acknowledge that a great deal of time spent in getting to an analysis solution has nothing to do with computational performance, but has more to do with the hurdles that users experience just figuring out how to do what they really want to do. This means focusing our efforts on education, improving documentation, abstracting away complexity, and giving users more functionality. If we can improve computational performance along the way, so much the better.
In order to provide some context for understanding the Experimental Development Team (Xdev), it’s useful to understand Pangeo first.