The Heat library becomes a NumFOCUS affiliated project

Heat team: C. Comito,  B. Hagemeier, K. Krajsek, T. Saupe, M. Tarnawa + students @ JSC J.P. Muriedas, M. Götz + students @ KIT (ended 2025) F. Hoppe, A. Rüttgers, H. Akdag + students @ DLR

We are excited to announce that Heat (Helmholtz Analytics Toolkit) is officially a NumFOCUS Affiliated Project. For our team of RSEs at FZJ, KIT, and (until not long ago) DLR, this is a strategic decision to embed Heat in a support system built exactly to develop and maintain foundational open-source research infrastructure.

What is NumFOCUS & why we joined

NumFOCUS is a non-profit umbrella organisation for critical open-source scientific software, backing industry standards like NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Affiliation requires strict scientific orientation and decentralized, open governance.

The Python ecosystem faces a scaling crisis as datasets outgrow the physical memory of single workstations. Heat bridges High-Performance Computing (HPC) to the PyData ecosystem. Our PyTorch- and MPI-based backend strives to adhere to the Array API, enabling the community to transparently scale workloads across distributed nodes and GPUs with minimal refactoring of existing code.

As a domain-agnostic library, we sought this affiliation to address two fundamental challenges in our daily operations:

• The outreach gap: Our core competencies lie in deep technical problem-solving, not public relations or community building. NumFOCUS immediately embeds us into the established PyData network, boosting our visibility and pulling us out of our academic bubble without the enormous cognitive cost of independent networking.

• Funding & administrative limits: Traditional academic grants prioritize novel research over software maintenance and agile feature development. NumFOCUS opens doors to flexible funding options outside rigid grant cycles and slashes the bureaucratic overhead required to host mentoring programs like Google Summer of Code.

We are committed to the long-term support of Heat, and integration into NumFOCUS is another step in the right direction. Being part of a larger software ecosystem and increasing community-sustained support is an important milestone to transition Heat from a grant-based driven project into a sustainable and community-driven library.

Written by: C. Comito