Clojurists Together fund a sum of $9,000 each for the open source projects, Neanderthal and Aleph

Clojurists Together shortlisted two projects namely Neanderthal and Aleph for Q1 of 2019 (February-April) to provide funding for further development of these projects, the details of which they shared yesterday. These projects will get total funding of $9,000, which means $3,000 per month.

https://twitter.com/cljtogether/status/1109925960155983872

What is Clojurists Together?

Clojurists Together was formed back in 2017 and is run by a board of developers in the Clojure Community. It focuses on keeping the development of open source Clojure software sustainable by raising funds and providing support for infrastructure and documentation. Additionally, it also supports other community initiatives like the Google Summer of Code.

The way it works is that open source developers apply for funding, and if the board members think that the project meets the requirements of the Clojurists Together members, their project is selected for funding. Then the developers get paid to work on their project for three months.

The funds are raised with the help of Clojure companies and individual developers who can sign up for a monthly contribution or do a one-time donation. This is their fifth funding cycle and previously they have supported datascript, kaocha, cljdoc, Shadow CLJS, clj-http, Figwheel, ClojureScript, and CIDER.

Details of the projects funded

Neanderthal

Neanderthal is a Clojure library for faster matrix and linear algebra computations. It is based on native libraries of BLAS and LAPACK computation routines for both CPU and GPU. On GPU, this library is almost 3000x faster than optimized Clojure/Java libraries and on CPU it is 100x faster than optimized pure Java.

This project is being developed by Dragan Djuric, who works on the Uncomplicate suite of libraries and is also the professor of Software Engineering at the University of Belgrade. Within the span of these three months, Djuric plans to work on some of the following updates:

Writing an introductory series named Deep Learning from the ground up with Clojure.

Integrating Nvidia’s cuSolver into Neanderthal's CUDA GPU engine to provide some key LAPACK functions that are only available on the CPU.

Along with these developments, he will also be improving the documentation and tutorials for Neanderthal.

Aleph

Aleph is a Clojure library for client and server network programming. Based on Netty, it is said to be one of the best options for building high-performance communication systems in Clojure. Oleksii Kachaiev, who is working on Aleph, has planned the following additions for Aleph in the allocated 3 months: