NSF-seeded Open Source software framework used for executing and managing small to large-scale applications and workflows across local resources, computational grids, and the Cloud.
Forest Hill, MD –-2 October 2012-– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Airavata has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.
"Being a TLP demonstrates Apache Airavata's commitment to 'The Apache Way' and the project's ability to self-govern, and be a part of the broader ASF community,"  said Chris Mattmann, Vice President of Apache OODT and member of the Apache Tika Project Management Committee. "We are excited to continue working to integrate Apache OODT and Airavata and to work together to leverage Apache Tika for data understanding, classification and extraction in both projects."
Designed to abstract out the complexities in accessing computational resources, Apache Airavata provides API's, sophisticated server-side tools, and graphical user interfaces to construct, execute, control and manage long running applications and workflows on distributed resources including local clusters, supercomputers, national grids, academic and commercial clouds.
"Airavata was initially developed by the National Science Foundation funded collaboration - Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery, for creating Cyberinfrastructure systems to enable faster-than-real-time severe weather forecasts" said Suresh Marru, Vice President of Apache Airavata. "Apache Airavata has evolved into a truly open and independent platform created to interface with emerging distributed computing paradigms including High Performance, High Throughput and On-Demand Computing."
The strategy of the Airavata framework is a minimalist architectural design - a conceptually simple to understand modular, componentized software - which is easy to install, maintain and use. This service oriented architecture helps Apache Airavata to blend into diverse software systems. Early adopters of Apache Airavata includes Science Gateways which integrate applications, workflows, data collections with computational resources like Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Additional users include ParamChem, the UltaScan Laboratory Information Management System, the Leadership Class Configuration Interaction Project, and the BioVLab Project.
"Sustainability of science gateways actually can have a very significant impact on science," said Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, co-director of the XSEDE Extended Support for Communities program, which includes gateways that interface to XSEDE resources. "This important leadership in the area of Open Source, community-developed code can be a model for many other scientific software projects. It's the sustainable projects with long-term viability."
Developed on open standards, Apache Airavata is collaboratively supported by individuals from diverse institutes, corporations and non-commercial organizations from around the world. Seeded by code donations from Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, interest in Apache Airavata continues, and the Project welcomes new participants to its growing community.
"The Airavata project began life as part of the NSF-funded Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery project," explained Marlon Pierce, Principal Investigator on the NSF-funded Open Gateway Computing Environments project and Science Gateway Group Lead at Indiana University. "We worked hard through additional NSF funding of the Open Gateway Computing Environments project to generalize the workflow software to many science (and broader) domains. For us, The Apache Software Foundation represents an important open community model as well as Open Source model for diversely-developed, sustainable scientific software. We hope to convince more in our community to follow suit."
Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Visiting Lecturer at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, added, "With its graduation as a TLP, Apache Airavata is trailblazing a path in science gateways research and development by embracing the 'Apache Way' and thereby ensuring wide international participation of software engineers, scientists, researchers and students." 
Since entering the Apache Incubator in May 2011, the Apache Airavata project has successfully produced several code releases in preparation of its first production-ready, v1.0 release.
Availability and Oversight
Apache Airavata software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Airavata source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://airavata.apache.org/.
About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organisations and existing external projects wishing to join the ASF enter through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/.
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way", more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Citrix, Cloudera, Facebook, Go Daddy, Google, HP, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, WANdisco, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.
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