What is Salvus?
I started the Salvus project as a successor to the free public Sage Notebook server, which has over 100,000 accounts, despite frequently failing under load. The Salvus webserver software is a complete rewrite from scratch of the notebook server, with a rethought design, running on hardware at University of Washington and other providers (including Servedby.net). The primary goal is to make Sage and other sophisticated free open source mathematical software available to a large number of simultaneous users.I will soon introduce Pro accounts that provide users with dedicated compute resources for commercial and research level computations and courses, at a level far above what I can possibly provide for free. The revenue from the Pro accounts will go toward paying for hardware hosting and support improving Salvus and Sage itself. If enough users sign up for Pro accounts, the resulting revenue will enable me to push Sage development far beyond what I've been able to do using government grants and volunteer work.
What about source code? Unlike the Sage notebook, Salvus is a large distributed web application, not a program designed to run on a single user's computer. The commercialization center at University of Washington imposed a condition that not all of the source code of Salvus is initially open. However, I anticipate that much open source code will eventually come out of the project.
William Stein, University of Washington, wstein@uw.edu
This project looks amazing, and the interface is so very beautiful (something that I was missing from the Sage notebook).
ReplyDeleteHow does this relate to the IPython notebook, which is gaining so much momentum lately? Are there any possibilities of collaboration to integrate these efforts?