Computational Journalism Server: SUSE Gallery Download Page
Computational Journalism Server: Github Project
Data Journalism Developer Studio Users Google Group
I’ve just published release 0.2.1 of the Computational Journalism Server to the SUSE Gallery. If you’re interested in beta testing it, please join the Data Journalism Developer Studio Users Google Group.
The Computational Journalism Server is a spinoff / refactoring of the Data Journalism Developer Studio. As I noted last month, it makes no sense for me to maintain and re-distribute a Linux desktop and desktop tools when 80 percent of my users already have a perfectly good non-Linux desktop where they can run those tools! So the plan is to migrate the server-based software from the original appliance into the new server appliance and remove it from the desktop appliance.
In addition, the server appliance is going to evolve to function as a node in a grid / cluster / cloud infrastructure. I’m hoping to eventually package it as an OpenStack compute node. The server appliance will be focused on the R language, CRAN library packages and task views, and whatever Linux packages are required to support the R environment. There are plenty of other platforms out there for Rails, Spring, Node.js, Django, and so forth, but I haven’t seen anything specifically for people who want to develop in R.
The core appliance at the moment consists of the following components:
- openSUSE 12.1 64 bit server base,
- The ATLAS high-performance linear algebra library,
- The R-patched distribution of R. This updates frequently and consists of patches on top of the most recent stable release,
- The PostgreSQL and SQLite3 databases,
- The Redis data structure store,
- R web servers:- Rapache, Rook, websockets, and R Server Pages,
- The RStudio Server IDE,
- The Natural Language Processing, Reproducible Research and High Performance Computing task views.
I’ll be posting more documentation on getting started with the Computational Journalism Server in the next few days. I plan to add the Spatial task view in the next week but have no plans for any more task views in the near future. The enhancements / bug fixes I am working on include
- Packaging as an OpenStack compute node,
- Rebuilding ATLAS and R-patched from source tuned to the server hardware,
- Fixing some underlying dependency issues in the High Performance Computing task view,
- OpenCL integration on NVidia hardware, and
- Demos of the web server capabilities.
