Another year almost gone

With the holidays almost upon us and while we start to wind down to spend some quality time with our families, I thought that it would be a good opportunity to recount some of the things that we have done during 2013.

For starters, a major release of the platform (4.0) and several minor releases are a tribute to the hard work of the entire HPCC Systems community. The full self-paced online training content for HPCC, covering basic and advanced Thor, Roxie and ECL content, programming exercises and self-assessment materials is also a significant step up from our more traditional face-to-face training, allowing hundreds or thousands of people to learn HPCC from the comfort of their sofas. The addition of the ECL bundle functionality is another great example of a relatively simple enhancement that can go a long way to open the door for code sharing and reuse, and we will be building on this concept in 2014 to support seamless download and installation of ECL bundles from public and private repositories. We also made some good progress in integration and tooling, with the release of the technical preview of the new ECLWatch, the enhanced support for Hadoop HDFS, an improved JDBC/SQL driver and myriads of enhancements in the areas of graphical user interfaces to HPCC, charts and dashboards. Outside of the platform itself, a substantial amount of progress in our academic and research outreach programs have started to create good traction in those communities too.

But it’s not just about the past, and there are already exciting things happening in our development branch, including state of the art optimizations to better utilize the existing hardware (multiple CPU cores per node in Thor, for example), porting more machine learning algorithms to the new PB-BLAS framework for vectorized distributed linear algebra arithmetic and the ongoing work in supporting available CUDA compatible hardware for accelerated processing. And this doesn’t even start to scratch the surface for what will come in 2014.

But if you got to this point, you probably already spent too much time reading and should be going back to celebrating.

Have a fun and safe enjoyable Holiday Season with your family, and come back for more in 2014!