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.

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: