You asked, we delivered!

A few users of BoscoR, and specifically GridR, have requested several major features:

1. Allow custom packages to be installed on the remote worker node (#3).
2. Specify custom R binaries for the worker nodes (#4).  Along with custom binaries, we also added logic so that if you upload new binaries to a URL, they will automatically be detected and installed (#7).
3. Asynchronous updating of batched processing.  This will enable the results to show up in the result list before the entire processing has been completed (#6)

Along with the above mentioned issues, we have also updated the default download location to be hosted at Indiana rather than Dropbox (hence the earlier blog post).

I hope to write a few posts in the next weeks with a more in-depth analysis of these significant user facing improvements, but in the mean time you can read the release notes which include details on how the new features work and how you can use them.

Today we have released the new version, v0.9.8, which includes all of these changes.

How you know you are doing something right?

I just received this from Dropbox:

The notification!

An R user in Wisconsin was using GridR so much... that he used up my bandwidth limit on Dropbox while downloading the R binaries.  I'm going to put this down as "a good problem to have".

CIC 13 Meeting

This week, the Campus Infrastructures Community debuted the OSG Connect service.  Overall it was a very successful workshop.  I met 2 users that where very excited about BoscoR, and we had great discussions about using the OSG.

Here are a few pictures from my trip to Duke for your viewing pleasure:

Mats Rynge teaching the basics of High Throughput Computing

Wandering around Duke University

The "Football" stadium at Duke.  I won't make any comparisons to Nebraska's...