HPCC Systems platform Roadmap and Happy Holidays!
As the end of the 2012 calendar year approaches, at least for a good chunk of the world (and may come to an end on 12/21 for a crazy bunch), some people start celebrating holidays in different cultures and countries. I consider this season a good time to go over things to come in the HPCC Systems platform arena.
Our 3.8 release is out (3.8.6-4 can be downloaded from here) and, while there may still be minor bug fixes (no, there are never bugs, just “under-appreciated features” that we may want to get rid of), 3.10 is well in the works. 3.10, which should be released in the next few weeks, changes the open source license to Apache 2.0 and brings a number of enhancements to the platform in different areas, as you can see from the commit history in our GitHub source code repository.
4.0, the next major release, is already in the plans and will bring a number of exciting new features, including improvements to our ECL Playground (if you haven’t played with it, I strongly recommend it), significant improvements to ECL watch, support for very fast linear algebra through PB-BLAS (not to be confused with PBLAS) and some other interesting developments, such as more thorough integration with R and reporting tools through external connectors, improved SQL/JDBC connectivity on dynamic Roxie queries for interactive reporting tools, and improvements around documentation and usage examples.
In the next few weeks, also expect to see improvements to our Portal, with the addition of a Wiki for collaborative documentation and a description of our general HPCC Systems roadmap and ongoing projects, to help community members decide if they’d like to join any of these efforts. As part of this move, we are planning to include specific projects that could be good starters for some community members, so please let us know if you would like to tackle any of those.
During 2013, we will be actively working to continue raising awareness for the HPCC Systems platform, and will be specifically focused on community building activities (details coming later). And, from the Exciting Training Department, we are currently working on creating a significant amount of materials for our upcoming MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), which will help you learn everything that you ever wanted to know about ECL, but were afraid to ask.
And now the shameless plug: Trish and I are tasked with the organization of the first Big Data track as part of the 2013 Symposium on Collaborative Technologies, in cooperation with ACM and IEEE, to happen in May, in San Diego, so please feel free, and a little bit compelled? 🙂 to submit papers, present posters and let us know of any other way that you may want to help.
Now go and enjoy with your families and have a great holiday season! Happy Hacking!