It has been a while since I actively blogged on this personal site of ours. It has been a busy couple of years and our teams have pushed the boundaries of pretty much any technology out there that deals with Data and Analytics.

Some 4-5 years ago we started an internal project and based on Ray Kurzweil's - The SIngularity is Near - we dubbed it Singularity.

We are only weeks away from launching V3 of our Singularity platform and its nothing short of amazing. We set out to scale big, economical, make complex easy, do the impossible in the hands of all our analysts, without special training or knowledge of complex programming languages. Putting hundreds of trillions of behavioral patterns to use, structuring complex data just enough to make it simple to use, yet keep loosely structured patterns they way they are, storing unstructured data as is and project logic and structure at runtime.

Just got back from Chicago, where over the past 2 days a small group of scientists, academia and industry discussed various aspects of cloud computing and related topics. 

One of the topics was about comparing extreme large scale analytical problems and the systems leverage to solve them. In order to compare classes of super computers, Alex Szalay (John Hopkins University) explained a simple yet interesting figure: The AMDAHL number (Amdahl's Law Bell, Gray and Szalay 2006)

Alex explained the Amdahl number (BW) as One bit of IO/sec per instruction/sec.

Why is this figure interesting?  To compare the analytical capabilities of various extreme large clusters, it is important to categorize them into different groups based on their processing capabilities. Typical commercial applications of large scale analytics require large amounts of IO per available CPU while various scientific applications require less IO per available CPU.

For a Blue Gene the BW=0.013, the JHU cluster BW = 0.664. So off

Analytics as a Service

What Do you think about Agile Analytics? Every heard about it? Well, here are a couple thoughts from the guys who deal with it on a daily basis.  

Analytics as a Service 

Looking forward to seeing your comments on this

Next week I will be attending the next iteration of the xldb group events organized around eXtreme Large Database Applications. xldb workshop

With 100s of Peta Bytes of information waiting to be captured and analyzed, new concepts are required to scale today's platforms by 1-3 orders of magnitudes.

Today we 'limit' ourselves to 'only' capture 40TB/day of incremental incoming data volumes, next generation requirements demand a much more detailed collection of event detail data. 100TB/day are already on the horizon giving us just 10 days of history per Peta Byte. With deep historical requirements of 3+ years of information, data volume growth will outpace Moor's Law. And I would not be surprised if next year this time we will be thinking about how to deal with 250TB/day — the writing is on the wall.

Improvements in Processing Power per CPU, advances in Memory and Storage are not going to the able to make up for the exponential growth of data processing requirements.

On February 22nd 2008 TACC formally introduced the go-live of RANGER - a massive scale supercomputer. While not a traditional relational processing system, the design shared many components and basic principles of large scale processing platform.

Of particular interest is the multi terabit infiniband interconnect that allows the system to (re)distribute massive amounts of data.

One of the early learnings from the system is that loading massive amounts of data can at times be a larger challenge, than processing that very same data once loaded into the system. It points out a very common issue with large scale data processing:

Finally I got to complete a high level systems overview. I realize it does not contain too much detail, but as you can imagine, we are bound by pretty strict NDAs.

Nevertheless, it should give you a good feel for how much data we process any given day. The stats are pretty much going into 2008 figures and are growing rapidly.

Here is a link to the article: Our Systems

Enjoy the reading and post your comments!

Oliver