SciPy Roadmap

This roadmap page contains only the most important ideas and needs for SciPy going forward. For a more detailed roadmap, including per-subpackage status, many more ideas, API stability and more, see Detailed SciPy Roadmap.

Support for distributed arrays and GPU arrays

NumPy has split its API from its execution engine with __array_function__ and __array_ufunc__. This will enable parts of SciPy to accept distributed arrays (e.g. dask.array.Array) and GPU arrays (e.g. cupy.ndarray) that implement the ndarray interface. At the moment it is not yet clear which algorithms will work out of the box, and if there are significant performance gains when they do. We want to create a map of which parts of the SciPy API work, and improve support over time.

In addition to making use of NumPy protocols like __array_function__, we can make use of these protocols in SciPy as well. That will make it possible to (re)implement SciPy functions like, e.g., those in scipy.signal for Dask or GPU arrays (see NEP 18 - use outside of NumPy). NumPy’s features in this areas are still evolving, see e.g. NEP 37 - A dispatch protocol for NumPy-like modules, and SciPy is an important “client” for those features.

Performance improvements

Speed improvements, lower memory usage and the ability to parallelize algorithms are beneficial to most science domains and use cases. We have established an API design pattern for multiprocessing - using the workers keyword - that can be adopted in many more functions.

Enabling the use of an accelerator like Pythran, possibly via Transonic, and making it easier for users to use Numba’s @njit in their code that relies on SciPy functionality would unlock a lot of performance gain. That needs a strategy though, all solutions are still maturing (see for example this overview).

Finally, many individual functions can be optimized for performance. scipy.optimize and scipy.interpolate functions are particularly often requested in this respect.

Statistics enhancements

The scipy.stats enhancements listed in the Detailed SciPy Roadmap are of particularly high importance to the project.

  • Improve the options for fitting a probability distribution to data.

  • Expand the set of hypothesis tests. In particular, include all the basic variations of analysis of variance.

  • Add confidence intervals for all statistical tests.

Support for more hardware platforms

SciPy now has continuous integration for ARM64 (or aarch64) and POWER8/9 (or ppc64le), and binaries are available via Miniforge. Wheels on PyPI for these platforms are now also possible (with the manylinux2014 standard), and requests for those are becoming more frequent.

Additionally, having IBM Z (or s390x) in CI is now possible with TravisCI but not yet done - and manylinux2014 wheels for that platform are also possible then. Finally, resolving open AIX build issues would help users.

Implement sparse arrays in addition to sparse matrices

The sparse matrix formats are mostly feature-complete, however the main issue is that they act like numpy.matrix (which will be deprecated in NumPy at some point). What we want is sparse arrays that act like numpy.ndarray. This is being worked on in https://github.com/pydata/sparse, which is quite far along. The tentative plan is:

  • Start depending on pydata/sparse once it’s feature-complete enough (it still needs a CSC/CSR equivalent) and okay performance-wise.

  • Indicate in the documentation that for new code users should prefer pydata/sparse over sparse matrices.

  • When NumPy deprecates numpy.matrix, vendor that or maintain it as a stand-alone package.

SciPy contributor guide Detailed SciPy Roadmap