CuPy™, the open-source library for general-purpose matrix calculation initiated by Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN), has received a grant of 350,000 U.S. dollars from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as an essential open-source software project for biomedical research. This grant will be used to fund efforts to develop new features of CuPy as well as to strengthen the project’s support for its open-source community.

CZI, the U.S. philanthropy co-founded by the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his spouse Priscilla Chan, has supported open-source software (OSS) projects that are essential to biomedical research under the Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program since 2019. CuPy was selected by CZI as one of the grantees in EOSS’s Cycle 5. EOSS has awarded grants to globally recognized OSS projects including NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, pip, conda-forge, and Apache Arrow. For more details about Cycle 5 of EOSS, please see CZI’s announcement and webpage on CuPy.

Originally a part of Chainer™, the open-source deep learning framework initiated by PFN, CuPy has been developed as an independent library by its open-source community since 2017.