We're pleased to announce the open source release of Yarn, a new JavaScript package manager built in collaboration with Exponent, Google, and Tilde. With Yarn, engineers have access to the npm registry, but can install packages faster, more securely, and more reliably. Yarn enables engineers to move faster and with confidence when using shared code so they can focus on what matters — building new products and features.

At our F8 conference this year, we showed a first glimpse of our early work in social VR. On stage today at the Oculus Connect conference, we gave a demo showing our newest explorations in this space, including more expressive avatars, ways to experience photos and videos together with friends, interacting with objects, and the ability to communicate with people who aren't in VR.

Three and a half years ago we open-sourced a JavaScript library called React. Today, React hit 50,000 stars on Github, which could not have happened without the amazing open source community that's built up around it!

Over the past few years we've built and incrementally released a profiling mechanism to improve the JIT’s optimizations and performance of our HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). Today, the entire redesign of the HHVM JIT has improved the CPU usage for running Facebook by about 15 percent.

A small team of engineers assembled for our Dublin Infra Hack this past April and spent two days hacking on a proof of concept for a DHCP load balancer that would sit behind our anycast VIP and source a list of DHCP servers from a file. We continued to make improvements and add features over the summer and deployed the system into our data centers. Today, we're open-sourcing the project, called dhcplb.

Most systems administrators use the industry standard Secure Shell (SSH) for accessing systems, and yet many of its special features are not widely leveraged. At Facebook, we take advantage of those features to use SSH in a way that is reliable, secure, and manageable. SSH, more specifically OpenSSH, has a great way to provide both the security and reliability we require: signed certificates with principals.

#ICYMI: Here's a quick recap of the news we announced at yesterday's @Scale conference.

BrowserLab automatically analyzes the performance of every code change made by engineers at Facebook, catching even the smallest regressions — as small as 20 ms — and ensures that our site continues to load quickly. Since we introduced the system into our workflow, it has helped engineers identify optimizations to remove more than 350 ms from every page load.

Facebook uses performant and scalable analytics to assist in product development. Apache Spark allows us to unify various analytics use cases into a single API and efficient compute engine. We challenged Spark to replace a pipeline that decomposed to hundreds of Hive jobs into a single Spark job. Through a series of performance and reliability improvements, we were able to scale Spark to handle one of our entity ranking data processing use cases in production. In this particular use case, we showed that Spark could reliably shuffle and sort 90 TB+ intermediate data and run 250,000 tasks in a single job. The Spark-based pipeline produced significant performance improvements (4.5-6x CPU, 3-4x resource reservation, and ~5x latency) compared with the old Hive-based pipeline.

MyRocks is a new open source project that integrates RocksDB as a new MySQL storage engine. With MyRocks, we can use RocksDB as backend storage and still benefit from all the features in MySQL.
After deploying MyRocks to a database tier in one of our data center regions, we were able to use 50 percent less storage for the same amount of data compared with compressed InnoDB.

Today we announced a new 360 video stabilization algorithm at @Scale 2016. This approach uses a new “deformed-rotation” motion model that we designed specifically for 360 video, and a new hybrid 3D-2D technique for optimizing the model parameters in order to make shaky 360 videos incredibly smooth. It improves efficiency, with a 10 percent to 20 percent reduction in bit rate for the same video quality. And it's fast — it can stabilize 360 video in less than 22 milliseconds per frame on a standard machine. In fact, videos can be stabilized using this technology in less time than it takes to play the video at normal speed.

We're thrilled to announce Zstandard 1.0, a new compression algorithm and implementation designed to scale with modern hardware and compress smaller and faster. Zstandard combines recent compression breakthroughs, like Finite State Entropy, with a performance-first design — and then optimizes the implementation for the unique properties of modern CPUs. As a result, it improves upon the trade-offs made by other compression algorithms and has a wide range of applicability with very high decompression speed. Zstandard, available now, is designed to be used in nearly every lossless compression scenario, including many where current algorithms aren't applicable.

A new state-of-the art system, named Robotron, manages tens of thousands of network devices connecting hundreds of thousands of servers globally at Facebook. The team behind Robotron published an overview of the system in a new paper, which also sheds light on key learnings they discovered while designing, implementing and operating the Robotron system on Facebook’s production network of data centers, global backbone, and edge point of presence (POPs) over the last eight years.

Over the past few years, advances in computer vision have enabled image classification as well as object detection. Today, Facebook AI Research is open-sourcing new computer vision algorithms that take these capabilities further, not only detecting but precisely delineating and labeling every object in an image.

We just opened the doors to a new 22,000-square-foot hardware lab at our Menlo Park office, outfitted with state-of-the-art machine tools and test equipment. With this new space, we can now handle the majority of our modeling, prototyping, and failure analysis in-house, decreasing each iteration of the development cycle from weeks to days. Our Connectivity Lab, Oculus, Building 8, and Infrastructure teams can now work collaboratively in the same space, learning from one another as they build.

Earlier this year we announced Surround 360, our high-quality 3D-360 hardware and software video capture system. Today, the full hardware design specs and stitching software code are available on GitHub so anyone will be able to contribute to, build on top of, improve, or distribute the camera. Our stitching software dramatically reduces processing time while maintaining 8k-per eye resolution, enabling creators to produce high-quality VR content more quickly than before.

Facebook's Connectivity Lab is developing many new technologies to bring affordable internet access to more people, including a fleet of solar-powered aircraft called Aquila that will beam broadband coverage to the ground.

After several months of flying scale models, we successfully completed the first full-scale test flight.

The low-altitude test flight lasted for 96 minutes — more than three times the planned mission length — and provided our aeronautics team with data on numerous aspects of Aquila's performance, including the autopilot, motors, batteries, radios, ground station, displays, basic aerodynamic handling, structural viability, and crew training. Follow the link to read more about our early learnings from the test flight and some of the challenges we're working on next.

Connectivity Lab's efforts to bring internet access to parts of the world that are still unconnected include both new technologies and explorations into more fundamental areas of research for communications solutions. The team published research results today detailing a new type of optical detector that could simplify the technology behind free-space laser communication and enable low-cost, high-speed connectivity in areas where traditional infrastructure is hard to build.

Our open source team has been hard at work the first half of this year, launching more than 50 projects and increasing support for the growing community.