Over the weekend, we updated all of the pbdR packages currently available on the CRAN. The updates include tons of internal housecleaning as well as many new features. Notably, pbdBASE_0.1-1 and pbdDMAT_0.1-1 were released, which contain lm.fit() methods. This function in particular has been available at my github for over a month, but didn't make its way to the CRAN until recently because of some annoying issues with S4 methods and R CMD check (don't get me started). But just a friendly reminder that features, tweaks, and bugfixes will make their way into our github repos much faster than they will make their way into the CRAN. I'm going to have a LOT to say about lm.fit() in my next entry --- more than you probably ever thought possible. For now I'll just say that our implementation is passing all of my tests, and early benchmarking suggests that it's pretty fast if you throw a large enough problem at it. If you have questions about any of our packages, feel free to ask us at our google group. Coming Soon What's coming soon ("soon") for pbdR? We've been working on a very thorough collection of package demos. That will be on the CRAN as soon as I can convince myself to write more documentation (don't get me started). We have also been hard at work creating some hooks into parallel readers. Very soon, you will be able to use parallel netCDF-4/HDF5 to read/write your data in a distributed way and easily use it inside the existing pbdR toolchain. We are also implementing a set of wrappers for the extremely powerful I/O middleware ADIOS. ADIOS is used on something like 40% of projects on the Jaguar supercomputer, which was recently upgraded to one again become the fastest supercomputer in the world (renamed to Titan). This is how some of the biggest projects in the world are handling their simulation data, and soon it is coming to R. In other news, our team leader George Ostrouchov is going to be giving a talk at the 2013 SIAM conference at a mini-symposium on Fast Numerical Computing with High-level Languages. Perhaps most exciting to me is that out of the 8 talks currently scheduled for the two sessions, 3 of them are specifically about developments in R. Rcpp and pbdR Followup In my last entry I made some comments about Rcpp. First [...]