November 20, 2015
pSeven 6.3 Release
DATADVANCE development team is pleased to announce the release of pSeven 6.3, a new stable version of our design space exploration platform for every expertise.
This release features significant usability and performance improvements, as well as algorithmic core updates and new results post-processing functions.
A general noticeable improvement in pSeven 6.3 is the increased responsiveness of the user interface. The GUI now supports asynchronous operations, meaning that you won't have to wait while pSeven processes data in the background. You can configure viewers in Analyze while it rebuilds plots, switch screens while a workflow or report loads, and so on. Browsing filesystem and project contents in workspace has also been optimized to avoid slowdowns in directories that contain a huge number of files. Finally, to speed up pSeven even more, we have added keyboard shortcuts for common commands; you can find the key combinations in menus and tooltips.
Another nice update in pSeven 6.3 is the support for CommonMark syntax, a more stable implementation of Markdown. In addition to project descriptions and workflow annotations, text formatted with CommonMark is now supported in workflow outputs in Run (useful for quick results presentation) and string data editors. Note that CommonMark allows including HTML snippets, and editors provide a preview of HTML-formatted text, too.
Another feature related to the CommonMark support is the new page viewer available in Analyze. This viewer accepts a list of strings and renders them as pages which you can scroll in the viewer window. The strings can contain HTML, CommonMark, or plain text. In future versions we plan to upgrade standard pSeven blocks so that they will output data ready for page viewer, making it a simple and useful tool for design space exploration. Right now you can already use it to show custom multi-page reports from such blocks as std.Text or std.PythonScript.
We have also simplified report data management in Analyze: when adding data from the project database to a report, existing data series are now re-used when possible, instead of creating new data series. In particular, re-adding data from the same record now works as a manual update of existing data series. A number of improvements is also added to the sample viewer:
- The viewer will show better responsiveness when working with large datasets.
- You can now drag-and-drop data series into an existing sample viewer to add them as new columns.
- Correlations on the Scatter Matrix tab can now be calculated not only for the whole dataset, but for any subset of points by selecting them on the plot.
- The errors plot on the Dependency tab now supports interactive zoom.
Workflow run performance has increased too, thanks to more effective data transfer between blocks. In particular, std.PythonScript now consumes much less memory when working with big data arrays.
Naturally, pSeven 6.3 has received all updates from MACROS 6.3: the new piecewise-linear approximation technique, the support for input rounding in model training, categorical variables support, and grid-based adaptive DoE generation. See the MACROS 6.3 release announcement for more details.
Finally, this release brings many user manual updates, including the detailed std.Optimizer and std.DoE documentation, a comprehensive guide on results post-processing in Analyze, updated examples and tutorials, and a full description of approximation methods available in pSeven.
pSeven 6.3 also resolves many stability issues and contains a number of important bugfixes. For details, you can see the release changelog, or contact us to receive more information and pSeven updates!