Today, I’m happy to an­nounce the new ma­jor ver­sion 5.0.0 of the pop­u­lar gradle-down­load-task. With this Gradle plug­in, you can down­load files in your build scripts and dis­play pro­gress in­form­a­tion. The re­lease notes for the new ver­sion are rather ex­tens­ive this time. High­lights in­clude down­load­ing mul­tiple files in par­al­lel, con­cur­rent ex­e­cu­tion with other build tasks, and bet­ter sup­port for Kot­lin and Gradle 8 (see full list of changes be­low). Up­dat­ing is re­com­men­ded for all users.

When I wrote end-to-end tests for Sudocle the other day, I no­ticed that they ran much faster when I star­ted my browser in non-head­less mode. After some de­bug­ging, I was able to fig­ure out that the browser I was us­ing to run my tests (Chrome/​Chro­mium), auto­mat­ic­ally em­ploys a soft­ware ren­derer for WebGL when star­ted head­less. Since Sudocle heav­ily re­lies on WebGL, the tests could be­ne­fit a great deal from hard­ware ac­cel­er­a­tion.

My pa­per “Ef­fi­cient Schedul­ing of Sci­entific Work­flow Ac­tions in the Cloud Based on Re­quired Cap­ab­il­it­ies” has just been pub­lished in Spring­er’s Com­mu­nic­a­tions in Com­puter and In­form­a­tion Sci­ence book series (CCIS).

I’ve just re­leased the new ver­sion 5.8.0 of my sci­entific work­flow man­age­ment sys­tem Steep. One of the high­lights of this ver­sion is in­creased fault tol­er­ance: Steep sched­ulers are now able to re­sume the work of other crashed in­stances when they de­tect that a pro­cess chain is run­ning but not mon­itored any­more. Steep 5.8.0 also in­cludes many other new fea­tures (see de­tails be­low). The ver­sion has been thor­oughly tested in prac­tise over the last couple of months.

Our pa­per with the title “Ex­ecut­ing cyc­lic sci­entific work­flows in the cloud” has just been re­leased in Spring­er’s Journal of Cloud Com­put­ing. In this pa­per, we present an al­gorithm and a soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture for a cloud-based sys­tem that ex­ecutes cyc­lic sci­entific work­flows whose struc­ture may change dur­ing run time.

I’m a huge Sudoku fan. Today, I’m re­leas­ing the first ver­sion of my new web app called Sudocle. The app has been in­spired by Crack­ing the Cryptic, the world’s most pop­u­lar You­Tube chan­nel about Sudoku and other lo­gic puzzles, which I can highly re­com­mend!