Month: October 2009

Lies, True Lies and Statistics

Consider the following data

https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Interview of David Smith May 2009

Ajay- Your blog at REVolution Computing is one of the best technical corporate blogs. In particular the monthly round up of new packages, R events and product launches all written in a lucid style. Are there any plans for a REvolution computing community or network as well instead of just the blog.

David- Yes, definitely. We recently hired Danese Cooper as our Open Source Diva to help us in this area. Danese has a wealth of experience building open-source communities, such as for Java at Sun. We’ll be announcing some new community initiatives this summer.

In the meantime, of course, we’ll continue with the Revolutions blog, which has proven to be a great vehicle for getting the word out about R to a community that hasn’t heard about it before. Thanks for the kind words about the blog, by the way — it’s been a lot of fun to write. It will be a continuing part of our community strategy, and I even plan to expand the roster of authors in the future, too. (If you’re an aspiring R blogger, please get in touch!)

And

Danese Cooper’s blog in October 2009

http://danesecooper.blogs.com/

Start the REvolution without me…

Some of you may have become aware of REvolution Computing, a commercial open source company organized around the R Language, when I joined in March of this year.  For the past few months we have been working on a B-Round of funding.  It was an interesting process and I was happy to be working in my first startup company after so many years in very large corporations.

We built a small team to work on “Community Engineering”, by which we meant developing assets both to benefit the R Language community as well as to entice and inform the “Alpha-Geek” community to learn and use R.  We set up an Advisory Board designed to advise REvolution management about decisions relating to REvo and Open Source, and we helped put REvolution R into the Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu.  It was really fun to work in a small, agile team and I felt like I was getting a great education in startups and we were rapidly moving the company forward…Why didn’t I join a startup years ago?

The funding deal closed on Wednesday last week…

Late the next afternoon I received a call from the new COO notifying me that my services would no longer be required at REvolution., effective immediately and with no severance.  Apparently, the company is moving in a different direction.

I was surprised that the new CEO,  wasn’t personally handling this unpleasant task…but I guess that might have been distasteful after the many assurances he gave me and my team last July at OSCON that we were “absolutely critical to the company’s success” and that he would be “making no changes for at least three months after he assumed control”.  Personal courage in difficult situations is rare.

Cloud Computing and GPU ( and some stats softwares)

Statistical Computing on GPU Clouds

While R has shown a lot of promise on running in the GPU environment, I am unaware if other statistical softwares are working to come up with a GPU strategy.

Even though they have a cloud computing strategy, the latest is the customized GPU’s by NVidia for Cloud Computing. This is likely to braing down computational cost of hardware significantly so RAM or Memory Hungry stats softwares that used to run slower on the desktop than other faster softwares could now catch up thanks to the cheaper hardware now available.

R too slow for heavy dataset- get a GPU and Put it on a cloud.

Rent High Performance Hardware by the hour. The High Performance Stats Software would be free.

WPS is though pushing ahead with creating engines for Oracle as well as Teradata while SAS Institute announced a 70 million investment in cloud computing early this year.

WPS is a SAS language syntax software and now run models as well IN SAME EXACT SYNTAX as Base SAS which was created by SAS Institute-

see screenshot from Installation of their WPS 2.4 Version Release

WPS Engines during Setup

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also see an article from the definative guide or website of High Performance Computing HPC Wire or

 Citation

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/NVIDIA-Pitches-GPU-Computing-in-the-Cloud-65217572.html

October 21, 2009 NVIDIA Pitches GPU Computing in the Cloud by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor ——————————————————————————–

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, NVIDIA announced a GPU-powered 3D Web platform. Called the NVIDIA RealityServer, it consists of Tesla GPUs, rendering software and a Web service environment, all integrated into a platform designed to deliver photorealistic image streams via a cloud computing model. The new offering is yet another example of how the company intends to push its high-end GPUs into CPU territory.

No news like Bad News

The news on funders replacing founders at Evolution Cromputing causes a big uptick in blog traffic.

Which dont matter since blog shifted to wordpress.com so bandwidth paid by Matt Muelberg

and ads are only worth 200$ per month ( not a penny less or penny more).

Viva the First Amendement. and the Fifth

Screenshot-22

Big Talking

Here is a link to my video capture of classroom presentation I did for some students today- ( note plays on Windows Media Player only and uses streaming thanks to the University of Tennessee’s high tech initiatives )

The slides are given in the form of SlideShare presentations and also here-

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcvss358_955fsvm8mfr&autoStart=true&loop=true

and

http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dcvss358_961djjqdtdd&autoStart=true&loop=true

The topics are

1) Creating an R Package easily ( till first 30 minutes)

and

2) Offshoring 101 (last 25 minutes)

Title: R and Offshorring
Speaker: Ajay Ohri
Desription: Oct 22, 2009
URL: http://vcweb.bus.utk.edu/20091022-124732-cap530/

ps- I am sorry for the accented language and hope audio is audible.

Oracle BIWA Presentation: Analytics Talk

Deadline EXTENDED to Friday, Oct. 23 to Submit Your

BIWA Presentation at COLLABORATE 2010

Submit a presentation BI/DW & Analytics – Brain-Powered by the BIWA SIG The IOUG is excited to partner with the BIWA SIG to present a special “conference within a conference” – Get Analytical with BIWA Training Days — on Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing, held in conjunction with COLLABORATE 10 – IOUG Forum. Those interested in Analytics, BI, Data Warehousing, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and OBIEE are encouraged to participate in this special forum.  For full track descriptions click here.

Don’t miss your chance to attend COLLABORATE 10, April 18-22 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for free!*Submit a presentation** through the IOUG Forum by this FRIDAY, October 23 for the chance to:

  • SHARE your Oracle Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics knowledge with your peers.
  • ENHANCE your own knowledge through the teaching of others.
  • ENJOY the recognition that comes with being a Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics speaker.

So what are you waiting for? Submit your Business Intelligence, Warehousing and Analytics presentation before the deadline — FRIDAY, October 23.

*Technical session and Deep Dive speakers receive complimentary registration to the full conference; and Quick Tip speakers receive 50% off the early bird registration rate.

**All Oracle employees interested in speaking at COLLABORATE 10 should contact Lisa Stuart at lisa.stuart@oracle.com. Please do not submit papers through the official COLLABORATE 10 call for speakers until approval is received.

***Register with code BIWA2010 for discounts and BI-nefits


Easy R

R is easy.

An updated presentation /compilation on creating new algorithms in R easily. I will follow this with a link to my video Tutorial which I gave in University later today.

Please let me know feedback.