Kepler 1.0.0 Released, May 12, 2008

 "This first release of Kepler will be of tremendous use to scientists from many disciplines because it provides an integrated environment for creating and executing analyses and models that were previously managed independently, " says Matthew Jones, Director of Informatics Research and Development at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara. "Kepler will facilitate significant science advances because it provides a platform for communicating precisely about the scientific process via the ability to share scientific workflows."

 The Kepler workflow system is designed to help scientists with little background in computer science as well as analysts and computer programmers build models called scientific workflows. Workflows help solve the all too common problem of analyzing data stored in a variety of formats with software components deployed and invoked in different ways. 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 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 1.0.0 is the first stable and documented release of Kepler, and subsequent 1.0.X versions will be backward compatible. Kepler collaborators are committed to the continued 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.

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 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.