[workspace-dev] Announcing Nimbus 2.7 final release

[Kate Keahey]

Happy (belated) Valentine's Day! From Nimbus, with love -- the final release of 2.7!

The most important new functionality in this release  is support for preemptible 
instances: "spot instances" as offered by Amazon EC2 and "backfill" instances,
their simplified version which we think may be more useful in a scientific setting. 
To learn more about this exciting new functionality see our blog:
http://scienceclouds.org/blog/catch-22-for-infrastructure-clouds/

In addition, we also extended our support for various EC2-compatible features, 
made improvements to several existing components of Nimbus, and included 
bugfixes. Simultaneously, we are also releasing a new cloud client #18 with bugfixes
and small enhancements.

Check out the changelog for full details: 
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.7/changelog.html#2.7

The effort for this release came almost entirely from our open source community. 
In particular, one of the main contributions (spot instances) was sponsored by 
Google Summer of Code. We would like to particularly acknowledge the contributions 
of Paulo Ricardo Motta Gomes, Paul Marshall, Patrick Armstrong, Pierre Riteau and 
Joe Bester. 

The Nimbus 2.7 release is available for download at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/downloads/

Documentation is available at:
http://www.nimbusproject.org/docs/2.7/

The Nimbus Team

Kate Keahey
Mathematics and CS Division, Argonne National Laboratory
Computation Institute, University of Chicago