As we noted in this post, one of the open source-focused companies that made a big splash at the recent OSCON conference was REvolution Computing. The company champions the use of R, an open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is used by many researchers when parallel processing of statistical data can help sift and analyze large amounts of information. We discussed what it's capable of at length in this post, and here are some of the new directions REvolution Computing and R are going in.

As you’re probably well aware, OSCON is one of the must-attend open source conferences held each year, and last week, the 11th annual OSCON was held in San Jose, California. Although some felt that OSCON didn’t quite make the splash in its new San Jose home that was expected, the decidedly geeky conference put on by tech publisher O’Reilly Media included many sessions and exhibitors of interest. Here are a few notable examples, in a guest column from SourceForge advisory board member Mark R. Hinkle.

Earlier this year, we covered R, a surprisingly robust open source statistical language. Revolution Computing has just announced that it is integrating its RPro commercially supported distribution of R into Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008, which is focused on clusters. A module within RPro, called ParallelR, enables cluster computing. Will this make high-performance computers and applications easier to deploy?