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# System prepended metadata

title: Zarr Summit Developer Days - Breakout Group Planning

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# Zarr Summit Developer Days - Breakout Group Planning

**Purpose**: Ensure everyone works on their priority topics across the 3 days

**Survey data**: This schedule is informed by 7 developer survey responses and 14 adopter survey responses

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## Instructions for Participants

**During the opening session (9:00-9:30 AM Monday)**, add your name to topics below:
- This will help us schedule breakout sessions
- **Step 1**: Add new topics if needed (3 minutes)
- **Step 2**: Add your name under the column that matches your interest level (3 minutes)
  - You can add your name to multiple topics!
- **Step 3**: Answer questions at the bottom of the document (2 minutes)

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## Core Technical Topics

### ~~Prototyping rectilinear chunk grids (variable-length/variable-shaped chunks)~~
*High priority: 57% of devs rated high interest*
- **Lead It**: 
- **Work On It**: @keewis
- **Join If Space**: @TomNicholas, @jhamman, Sebastian, @LDeakin, @maxrjones, @alimanfoo, @malmans2, @rouault, Hugo Gruson

Readout: Productive, implemented in zarrs with a extensions PR ready

### ~~Improving ease-of-use and performance of sharding~~
*7 adopter mentions*
- **Lead It**: Mark Kittisopikul (@markkitti)
- **Work On It**: @perlman
- **Join If Space**: @LDeakin, @keewis, @malmans2, @rouault, @markkitti, @maxrjones

Readout: Discussed how to implement sharding at the API level and implications for virtual zarr/icechunk

Group discussion:
- Should it be a codec?
    - Seems like a missing abstraction (i.e., layout)
        - layouts include Icechunk and VirtualiZarr
    - what is the concern with it being a codec?
        - impact on the abstractions in an implementation (i.e., contagious async) 
            - harder to profile with async
- chunks and sub-chunks would've been more clear, could be fixed in V4
- perhaps another breakout on this?

### Designing and prototyping sparse array storage
- **Lead It**: @keewis
- **Work On It**: 
- **Join If Space**: @TomNicholas, Sebastian

### Designing and prototyping optional codecs
- See below

### ~~Advancing specs for data types, codecs, and extensions~~
*High priority: 71% of devs rated high interest*
- **Lead It**: @d-v-b
- **Work On It**: @keewis, @LDeakin, @maxrjones, @tomwhite
- **Join If Space**: @TomNicholas, @perlman, @tomwhite, @alimanfoo, @vincentsarago, Hugo Gruson

Readout: Discussed clarifications needed for zarr-extensions readout

### ~~Creating reference datasets and centralized benchmarks for comparing implementations~~
- **Lead It**: @maxrjones
- **Work On It**: @d-v-b, @jhamman, @perlman, @nishadhka, Hugo Gruson
- **Join If Space**: @alimanfoo @LDeakin @joshmoore

Readout: Discussed centralized vs decentralized, later mind-meld recommends CLI for implementations to be able run

Discussion:
- Starts to sound like a standard API

### Optimizing performance and reducing memory usage
*Gap: Top adopter priority (11 mentions) but low dev interest.*
- **Lead It**: 
- **Work On It**: @jhamman @LDeakin
- **Join If Space**: Sebastian, @maxrjones, Hugo Gruson, @perlman

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## Ecosystem & Tools Topics

### ~~Advancing VirtualiZarr capabilities~~
*8 adopter mentions*
- **Lead It**: @TomNicholas
- **Work On It**: @maxrjones
- **Join If Space**: @LDeakin, @jsignell @joshmoore (particularly intersted in spec-ifing), @rouault

Readout: Discussed "spec-ify" virtual chunks as native zarr, landed on a proposal to store virtual references as Zarr arrays, could conceptualize all zarr arrays as virtual arrays where "native arrays" have an implicit structure

Discussion:
- would it be a new node type?
    - probably not necessary, falls into a category of needs for a group of arrays that mean something to certain people
- perhaps an implementation session?

### Upstreaming lessons learned from Icechunk
*7 adopter mentions*
- **Lead It**: 
- **Work On It**: @TomNicholas, Sebastian
- **Join If Space**: @jhamman, @alimanfoo, @malmans2, @maxrjones

### Evolving the Store interface for modern use cases
- **Lead It**: @jhamman
- **Work On It**: Sebastian
- **Join If Space**: @alimanfoo @joshmoore @maxrjones

### Enabling better Zarr visualization and web access
*9 adopter mentions*
- **Lead It**: 
- **Work On It**: @perlman, @vincentsarago, 
- **Join If Space**: @nisahdhka, @maxrjones

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## Community & Adoption Topics

### Improving Zarr documentation and resources
- **Lead It**: 
- **Work On It**:
- **Join If Space**: @perlman, @alimanfoo

### Cross-disciplinary multi-scale extensions
*18 geospatial mentions, 4 microscopy mentions*
- **Lead It**: @maxrjones
- **Work On It**: @perlman, @keewis, @rouault
- **Join If Space**: @jhamman @LDeakin, @vincentsarago, @jsignell, @joshmoore

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## Additional Topics

### Smoothing the V2 → V3 migration path
*4 adopter mentions. Goal: Create migration guides and tooling*
- **Lead It**: Mark Kittisopikul
- **Work On It**: Hugo Gruson
- **Join If Space**: @LDeakin @perlman @alimanfoo @maxrjones @tomwhite 

### ~~Missing values~~
- **Topic**: How to support missing values in Zarr (has some overlap with Arrow bitmaps?)
  - **Lead It**: 
  - **Work On It**: @tomwhite, @maxrjones
  - **Join If Space**: @LDeakin, @keewis, @markkitti

Readout: Solved :tada:

### Arrow?
- **Topic**: Arrow is massive - can Zarr integrate deeply with it somehow?
  - **Lead It**: 
  - **Work On It**: @rabernat, @markkitti
  - **Join If Space**: @TomNicholas, @keewis, @LDeakin, @alimanfoo, @tomwhite @joshmoore, @maxrjones, @rouault

### ~~Optional codec~~
- **Topic**: Allow for codecs to be not applied on a per-chunk basis, matches HDF5 feature, allows for an upper-bound on chunk size, helps 
  - Could fold into sharding discussion
  - **Lead It**: Mark Kittisopikul
  - **Work On It**: 
  - **Join If Space**: @LDeakin
  
### Zarr Steering Council (ZSC) / governance feedback session
- **Topic**: Opportunity to discuss the overall organization and any needs of the community. This is very much an optional topic and can also be done during coffee breaks. Please grab us.
  - **Lead It**:  @joshmoore, John Kirkham, Alistair Miles
  - **Work On It**: @jhamman, @alimanfoo
  - **Join If Space**: @LDeakin, @maxrjones

### Interaction with Foreign Standards
- **Topic**: How do we work with HDF5, (Geo)TIFF, and other formats that can encode "arrays"
    - Add a chunk-key-encoding that allows chunks to have file extensions?
        - @LDeakin I have an experimental extension for this in `zarrs`
        - "Chunk key encoding transformers"?
    - Dual encoding
    - How does this relate to virtualizarr?
    - summarize note on grib and scan_grib routine
  - **Lead It**: 
  - **Work On It**: 
  - **Join If Space**: @jsignell @TomNicholas @nishadhka @LDeakin @maxrjones
  - References and Prior work
      - https://element84.com/software-engineering/is-zarr-the-new-cog/
      - https://github.com/mkitti/simple_image_formats
      - https://virtualizarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html
      - https://fsspec.github.io/kerchunk/

### Full stack control of concurrency/parallelism 
- **Topic**: Zarr-Python 3 added significant concurrency through threading and asyncio. But interactions with upstream parallel array frameworks (e.g. Dask) have suffered. 
  - **Lead It**: 
  - **Work On It**: @jhamman
  - **Join If Space**: @TomNicholas, @tomwhite 

### Other topics (please add below with your name)
- **Topic**: _________________
  - **Lead It**: 
  - **Work On It**: 
  - **Join If Space**: 

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## Quick Questions (Optional - helps with scheduling)

**Time constraints?** (Add your name if you have these)
- Leaving early on _____ (day):
- Arriving late on Monday: @rabernat, Tina
- Have conflict during _____ (time): 
- @jsignell - At STAC sprint Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 
- @joshmoore - Leaving before lunch on Tuesday

**What's one thing you hope to accomplish by Wednesday?**
- (Add your name + quick goal):
- @alimanfoo - collect any ideas for how the steering council could better support and reduce friction for the community
- Add a discussion on CMORPH AWS S3 netcdf file refernces in virtualizarr and note on pencil and pancake chunking benchmarking 

## I'm done

- Josh
- @alimanfoo
- @jsignell
- @LDeakin
- Sebastian
- @jhamman
- @TomNicholas 
- @mslyksVbToikcAGZIC-lDA 
- @vincentsarago
- @tomwhite 
- @malmans2
- @rouault
- @perlman 
- @maxrjones
- @keewis
- Hugo
- @nishadhka
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