DSC2 v0.1.0-alpha

This is an alpha release of DSC2. At this point we consider the project 60% complete. In addition to newly developed DSC syntax and command interface that potentially allow for flexible design and implementation of Dynamic Statistical Comparison using a variety of computational tools, major improvements over DSCR include:

• Application of runtime signature which caches commands, parameters and input / output files so that only newly introduced DSC blocks will be executed in the event of DSC script updates; existing results will be used as fit and computational efforts are thus saved.
• Embarrassing parallelization is supported. The DSC process can be paralleled if the script involves multiple replicates or concurrent processes running the same computational routine with different input parameter.
• Output are organized in database which can be queried from using SQL or loaded to R to analyze. A command interface is also provided to interact with the output data.

Still missing from DSC2 are:

• Full parallelization. This requires implementation of dependency controls, based on mechanisms such as directed acyclic graph (DAG).
• Native support on cluster.
• Extensive unit-tests and a lot more examples. This release is very much under-tested and possibly buggy. Some features documented on the syntax page are still missing.

In sum, this version of DSC2 is good to run on a desktop computer, and only guarantees to work for vignettes constituting the current state of the Mini Course on the project wiki.

Apart from full parallelization and cluster support, the pace of development will slow down after this release, and we will start to interact with users to work out more examples, fix bugs and let DSC syntax evolve over time to satisfy the needs in real world research. Comments and feature requests through tickets are welcomed.

Source code of this release is available for download below. Please checkout the installation guide to get it up and running!