Some slides I liked on cloud computing infrastructure as offered by Amazon, IBM, Google , Windows and Oracle
Some slides I liked on cloud computing infrastructure as offered by Amazon, IBM, Google , Windows and Oracle
Revolution Analytics has of course had RevoDeployR, and in a webinar strive to bring it back to center spotlight.
BI is a good lucrative market, and visualization is a strength in R, so it is matter of time before we have more R based BI solutions. I really liked the two slides below for explaining RevoDeployR better to newbies like me (and many others!)
Integrating R into 3rd party and Web applications using RevoDeployR
Please click here to download the PDF.
Here are some additional links that may be of interest to you:
( I still think someone should make a commercial version of Jeroen Oom’s web interfaces and Jeff Horner’s web infrastructure (see below) for making customized Business Intelligence (BI) /Data Visualization solutions , UCLA and Vanderbilt are not exactly Stanford when it comes to deploying great academic solutions in the startup-tech world). I kind of think Google or someone at Revolution should atleast dekko OpenCPU as a credible cloud solution in R.
I still cant figure out whether Revolution Analytics has a cloud computing strategy and Google seems to be working mysteriously as usual in broadening access to the Google Compute Cloud to the rest of R Community.
Open CPU provides a free and open platform for statistical computing in the cloud. It is meant as an open, social analysis environment where people can share and run R functions and objects. For more details, visit the websit: www.opencpu.org
and esp see
https://public.opencpu.org/userapps/opencpu/opencpu.demo/runcode/
Jeff Horner’s
Jerooen Oom’s
hi1.4xlarge instances come with eight virtual cores that can deliver 35 EC2 Compute Units (ECUs) of CPU performance, 60.5 GiB of RAM, and 2 TiB of storage capacity across two SSD-based storage volumes. Customers using hi1.4xlarge instances for their applications can expect over 120,000 4 KB random write IOPS, and as many as 85,000 random write IOPS (depending on active LBA span). These instances are available on a 10 Gbps network, with the ability to launch instances into cluster placement groups for low-latency, full-bisection bandwidth networking.
High I/O instances are currently available in three Availability Zones in US East (N. Virginia) and two Availability Zones in EU West (Ireland) regions. Other regions will be supported in the coming months. You can launch hi1.4xlarge instances as On Demand instances starting at $3.10/hour, and purchase them as Reserved Instances
Instances of this family provide very high instance storage I/O performance and are ideally suited for many high performance database workloads. Example applications include NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB. High I/O instances are backed by Solid State Drives (SSD), and also provide high levels of CPU, memory and network performance.
High I/O Quadruple Extra Large Instance
60.5 GB of memory
35 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 4.4 EC2 Compute Units each)
2 SSD-based volumes each with 1024 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
Storage I/O Performance: Very High*
API name: hi1.4xlarge
*Using Linux paravirtual (PV) AMIs, High I/O Quadruple Extra Large instances can deliver more than 120,000 4 KB random read IOPS and between 10,000 and 85,000 4 KB random write IOPS (depending on active logical block addressing span) to applications. For hardware virtual machines (HVM) and Windows AMIs, performance is approximately 90,000 4 KB random read IOPS and between 9,000 and 75,000 4 KB random write IOPS. The maximum sequential throughput on all AMI types (Linux PV, Linux HVM, and Windows) per second is approximately 2 GB read and 1.1 GB write.
Here is an interview with James G Kobielus, who is the Senior Program Director, Product Marketing, Big Data Analytics Solutions at IBM. Special thanks to Payal Patel Cudia of IBM’s communication team,for helping with the logistics for this.
Ajay -What are the specific parts of the IBM Platform that deal with the three layers of Big Data -variety, velocity and volume
James-Well first of all, let’s talk about the IBM Information Management portfolio. Our big data platform addresses the three layers of big data to varying degrees either together in a product , or two out of the three or even one of the three aspects. We don’t have separate products for the variety, velocity and volume separately.
Let us define these three layers-Volume refers to the hundreds of terabytes and petabytes of stored data inside organizations today. Velocity refers to the whole continuum from batch to real time continuous and streaming data.
Variety refers to multi-structure data from structured to unstructured files, managed and stored in a common platform analyzed through common tooling.
For Volume-IBM has a highly scalable Big Data platform. This includes Netezza and Infosphere groups of products, and Watson-like technologies that can support petabytes volume of data for analytics. But really the support of volume ranges across IBM’s Information Management portfolio both on the database side and the advanced analytics side.
For real time Velocity, we have real time data acquisition. We have a product called IBM Infosphere, part of our Big Data platform, that is specifically built for streaming real time data acquisition and delivery through complex event processing. We have a very rich range of offerings that help clients build a Hadoop environment that can scale.
Our Hadoop platform is the most real time capable of all in the industry. We are differentiated by our sheer breadth, sophistication and functional depth and tooling integrated in our Hadoop platform. We are differentiated by our streaming offering integrated into the Hadoop platform. We also offer a great range of modeling and analysis tools, pretty much more than any other offering in the Big Data space.
Attached- Jim’s slides from Hadoop World
Ajay- Any plans for Mahout for Hadoop
Jim- I cant speak about product plans. We have plans but I cant tell you anything more. We do have a feature in Big Insights called System ML, a library for machine learning.
Ajay- How integral are acquisitions for IBM in the Big Data space (Netezza,Cognos,SPSS etc). Is it true that everything that you have in Big Data is acquired or is the famous IBM R and D contributing here . (see a partial list of IBM acquisitions at at http://www.ibm.com/investor/strategy/acquisitions.wss )
Jim- We have developed a lot on our own. We have the deepest R and D of anybody in the industry in all things Big Data.
For example – Watson has Big Insights Hadoop at its core. Apache Hadoop is the heart and soul of Big Data (see http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/hadoop/ ). A great deal that makes Big Insights so differentiated is that not everything that has been built has been built by the Hadoop community.
We have built additions out of the necessity for security, modeling, monitoring, and governance capabilities into BigInsights to make it truly enterprise ready. That is one example of where we have leveraged open source and we have built our own tools and technologies and layered them on top of the open source code.
Yes of course we have done many strategic acquisitions over the last several years related to Big Data Management and we continue to do so. This quarter we have done 3 acquisitions with strong relevance to Big Data. One of them is Vivisimo (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37491.wss ).
Vivisimo provides federated Big Data discovery, search and profiling capabilities to help you figure out what data is out there,what is relevance of that data to your data science project- to help you answer the question which data should you bring in your Hadoop Cluster.
We also did Varicent , which is more performance management and we did TeaLeaf , which is a customer experience solution provider where customer experience management and optimization is one of the hot killer apps for Hadoop in the cloud. We have done great many acquisitions that have a clear relevance to Big Data.
Netezza already had a massively parallel analytics database product with an embedded library of models called Netezza Analytics, and in-database capabilties to massively parallelize Map Reduce and other analytics management functions inside the database. In many ways, Netezza provided capabilities similar to that IBM had provided for many years under the Smart Analytics Platform (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/what-is-advanced-analytics/ ) .
There is a differential between Netezza and ISAS.
ISAS was built predominantly in-house over several years . If you go back a decade ago IBM acquired Ascential Software , a product portfolio that was the heart and soul of IBM InfoSphere Information Manager that is core to our big Data platform. In addition to Netezza, IBM bought SPSS two years back. We already had data mining tools and predictive modeling in the InfoSphere portfolio, but we realized we needed to have the best of breed, SPSS provided that and so IBM acquired them.
Cognos– We had some BI reporting capabilities in the InfoSphere portfolio that we had built ourselves and also acquired for various degrees from prior acquisitions. But clearly Cognos was one of the best BI vendors , and we were lacking such a rich tool set in our product in visualization and cubing and so for that reason we acquired Cognos.
There is also Unica – which is a marketing campaign optimization which in many ways is a killer app for Hadoop. Projects like that are driving many enterprises.
Ajay- How would you rank order these acquisitions in terms of strategic importance rather than data of acquisition or price paid.
Jim-Think of Big Data as an ecosystem that has components that are fitted to particular functions for data analytics and data management. Is the database the core, or the modeling tool the core, or the governance tools the core, or is the hardware platform the core. Everything is critically important. We would love to hear from you what you think have been most important. Each acquisition has helped play a critical role to build the deepest and broadest solution offering in Big Data. We offer the hardware, software, professional services, the hosting service. I don’t think there is any validity to a rank order system.
Ajay-What are the initiatives regarding open source that Big Data group have done or are planning?
Jim- What we are doing now- We are very much involved with the Apache Hadoop community. We continue to evolve the open source code that everyone leverages.. We have built BigInsights on Apache Hadoop. We have the closest, most up to date in terms of version number to Apache Hadoop ( Hbase,HDFS, Pig etc) of all commercial distributions with our BigInsights 1.4 .
We have an R library integrated with BigInsights . We have a R library integrated with Netezza Analytics. There is support for R Models within the SPSS portfolio. We already have a fair amount of support for R across the portfolio.
Ajay- What are some of the concerns (privacy,security,regulation) that you think can dampen the promise of Big Data.
Jim- There are no showstoppers, there is really a strong momentum. Some of the concerns within the Hadoop space are immaturity of the technology, the immaturity of some of the commercial offerings out there that implement Hadoop, the lack of standardization for formal sense for Hadoop.
There is no Open Standards Body that declares, ratifies the latest version of Mahout, Map Reduce, HDFS etc. There is no industry consensus reference framework for layering these different sub projects. There are no open APIs. There are no certifications or interoperability standards or organizations to certify different vendors interoperability around a common API or framework.
The lack of standardization is troubling in this whole market. That creates risks for users because users are adopting multiple Hadoop products. There are lots of Hadoop deployments in the corporate world built around Apache Hadoop (purely open source). There may be no assurance that these multiple platforms will interoperate seamlessly. That’s a huge issue in terms of just magnifying the risk. And it increases the need for the end user to develop their own custom integrated code if they want to move data between platforms, or move map-reduce jobs between multiple distributions.
Also governance is a consideration. Right now Hadoop is used for high volume ETL on multi structured and unstructured data sources, or Hadoop is used for exploratory sand boxes for data scientists. These are important applications that are a majority of the Hadoop deployments . Some Hadoop deployments are stand alone unstructured data marts for specific applications like sentiment analysis like.
Hadoop is not yet ready for data warehousing. We don’t see a lot of Hadoop being used as an alternative to data warehouses for managing the single version of truth of system or record data. That day will come but there needs to be out there in the marketplace a broader range of data governance mechanisms , master data management, data profiling products that are mature that enterprises can use to make sure their data inside their Hadoop clusters is clean and is the single version of truth. That day has not arrived yet.
One of the great things about IBM’s acquisition of Vivisimo is that a piece of that overall governance picture is discovery and profiling for unstructured data , and that is done very well by Vivisimo for several years.
What we will see is vendors such as IBM will continue to evolve security features inside of our Hadoop platform. We will beef up our data governance capabilities for this new world of Hadoop as the core of Big Data, and we will continue to build up our ability to integrate multiple databases in our Hadoop platform so that customers can use data from a bit of Hadoop,some data from a bit of traditional relational data warehouse, maybe some noSQL technology for different roles within a very complex Big Data environment.
That latter hybrid deployment model is becoming standard across many enterprises for Big Data. A cause for concern is when your Big Data deployment has a bit of Hadoop, bit of noSQL, bit of EDW, bit of in-memory , there are no open standards or frameworks for putting it all together for a unified framework not just for interoperability but also for deployment.
There needs to be a virtualization or abstraction layer for unified access to all these different Big Data platforms by the users/developers writing the queries, by administrators so they can manage data and resources and jobs across all these disparate platforms in a seamless unified way with visual tooling. That grand scenario, the virtualization layer is not there yet in any standard way across the big data market. It will evolve, it may take 5-10 years to evolve but it will evolve.
So, that’s the concern that can dampen some of the enthusiasm for Big Data Analytics.
About-
You can read more about Jim at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-kobielus/6/ab2/8b0 or
follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jameskobielus
You can read more about IBM Big Data at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/
Ajay- What are some of the privacy guidelines that you keep in mind- given the fact that you collect individual information but also have government agencies as potential users.
Prior to his election as ACM president, Chesnais was vice president from July 2008 – June 2010 as well as secretary/treasurer from July 2006 – June 2008. He also served as president of ACM SIGGRAPH from July 2002 – June 2005 and as SIG Governing Board Chair from July 2000 – June 2002.
As a French citizen now residing in Canada, he has more than 20 years of management experience in the software industry. He joined the local SIGGRAPH Chapter in Paris some 20 years ago as a volunteer and has continued his involvement with ACM in a variety of leadership capacities since then.
TrendSpottr is a real-time viral search and predictive analytics service that identifies the most timely and trending information for any topic or keyword. Our core technology analyzes real-time data streams and spots emerging trends at their earliest acceleration point — hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.
TrendSpottr serves as a predictive early warning system for news and media organizations, brands, government agencies and Fortune 500 companies and helps them to identify emerging news, events and issues that have high viral potential and market impact. TrendSpottr has partnered with HootSuite, DataSift and other leading social and big data companies.
Amazon gets some competition, and customers should see some relief, unless Google withdraws commitment on these products after a few years of trying (like it often does now!)
http://cloud.google.com/products/index.html
Machine Type Pricing | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Configuration | Virtual Cores | Memory | GCEU * | Local disk | Price/Hour | $/GCEU/hour |
n1-standard-1-d | 1 | 3.75GB *** | 2.75 | 420GB *** | $0.145 | 0.053 |
n1-standard-2-d | 2 | 7.5GB | 5.5 | 870GB | $0.29 | 0.053 |
n1-standard-4-d | 4 | 15GB | 11 | 1770GB | $0.58 | 0.053 |
n1-standard-8-d | 8 | 30GB | 22 | 2 x 1770GB | $1.16 | 0.053 |
Network Pricing | |
---|---|
Ingress | Free |
Egress to the same Zone. | Free |
Egress to a different Cloud service within the same Region. | Free |
Egress to a different Zone in the same Region (per GB) | $0.01 |
Egress to a different Region within the US | $0.01 **** |
Inter-continental Egress | At Internet Egress Rate |
Internet Egress (Americas/EMEA destination) per GB | |
0-1 TB in a month | $0.12 |
1-10 TB | $0.11 |
10+ TB | $0.08 |
Internet Egress (APAC destination) per GB | |
0-1 TB in a month | $0.21 |
1-10 TB | $0.18 |
10+ TB | $0.15 |
Persistent Disk Pricing | |
---|---|
Provisioned space | $0.10 GB/month |
Snapshot storage** | $0.125 GB/month |
IO Operations | $0.10 per million |
IP Address Pricing | |
---|---|
Static IP address (assigned but unused) | $0.01 per hour |
Ephemeral IP address (attached to instance) | Free |
Google Prediction API
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Build smart apps
Learn how you can use Prediction API to build customer sentiment analysis, spam detection or document and email classification.
Google Translation API
Use Google Translate API to build multilingual apps and programmatically translate text in your webpage or application.
Translate text into other languages programmatically
Use the familiar RESTful interface
Take advantage of Google’s powerful translation algorithms
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Learn how you can use Translate API to build apps that can programmatically translate text in your applications or websites.
Google BigQuery
Analyze Big Data in the cloud using SQL and get real-time business insights in seconds using Google BigQuery. Use a fully-managed data analysis service with no servers to install or maintain.
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Scale infinitely
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Google App Engine
Create apps on Google’s platform that are easy to manage and scale. Benefit from the same systems and infrastructure that power Google’s applications.
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Here is a brief interview with Alvaro Tejada Galindo aka Blag who is a developer working with SAP Hana and R at SAP Labs, Montreal. SAP Hana is SAP’s latest offering in BI , it’s also a database and a computing environment , and using R and HANA together on the cloud can give major productivity gains in terms of both speed and analytical ability, as per preliminary use cases.
Ajay- What made the R language a fit for SAP HANA. Did you consider other languages? What is your view on Julia/Python/SPSS/SAS/Matlab languages
Blag- I think “R” is a must for SAP HANA. As the fastest database in the market, we needed a language that could help us shape the data in the best possible way. “R” filled that purpose very well. Right now, “R” is not the only language as “L” can be used as well (http://wiki.tcl.tk/17068) …not forgetting “SQLScript” which is our own version of SQL (http://goo.gl/x3bwh) . I have to admit that I tried Julia, but couldn’t manage to make it work. Regarding Python, it’s an interesting question as I’m going to blog about Python and SAP HANA soon. About Matlab, SPSS and SAS I haven’t used them, so I got nothing to say there.
Ajay- What is your view on some of the limitations of R that can be overcome with using it with SAP HANA.
Blag- I think mostly the ability of SAP HANA to work with big data. Again, SAP HANA and “R” can work very nicely together and achieve things that weren’t possible before.
Ajay- Have you considered other vendors of R including working with RStudio, Revolution Analytics, and even Oracle R Enterprise.
Blag- I’m not really part of the SAP HANA or the R groups inside SAP, so I can’t really comment on that. I can only say that I use RStudio every time I need to do something with R. Regarding Oracle…I don’t think so…but they can use any of our products whenever they want.
Ajay- Do you have a case study on an actual usage of R with SAP HANA that led to great results.
Blag- Right now the use of “R” and SAP HANA is very preliminary, I don’t think many people has start working on it…but as an example that it works, you can check this awesome blog entry from my friend Jitender Aswani “Big Data, R and HANA: Analyze 200 Million Data Points and Later Visualize Using Google Maps “ (http://allthingsr.blogspot.com/#!/2012/04/big-data-r-and-hana-analyze-200-million.html)
Ajay- Does your group in SAP plan to give to the R ecosystem by attending conferences like UseR 2012, sponsoring meets, or package development etc
Blag- My group is in charge of everything developers, so sure, we’re planning to get more in touch with R developers and their ecosystem. Not sure how we’re going to deal with it, but at least I’m going to get myself involved in the Montreal R Group.
About-
http://scn.sap.com/people/alvaro.tejadagalindo3
Name: | Alvaro Tejada Galindo |
Email: | a.tejada.galindo@sap.com |
Profession: | Development |
Company: | SAP Canada Labs-Montreal |
Town/City: | Montreal |
Country: | Canada |
Instant Messaging Type: | |
Instant Messaging ID: | Blag |
Personal URL: | http://blagrants.blogspot.com |
Professional Blog URL: | http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/252210910 |
My Relation to SAP: | employee |
Short Bio: | Development Expert for the Technology Innovation and Developer Experience team.Used to be an ABAP Consultant for the last 11 years. Addicted to programming since 1997. |
http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/in-memory-computing-platform/hana/overview/index.epx
and from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_HANA
SAP HANA is SAP AG’s implementation of in-memory database technology. There are four components within the software group:[1]
R is integrated in HANA DB via TCP/IP. HANA uses SQL-SHM, a shared memory-based data exchange to incorporate R’s vertical data structure. HANA also introduces R scripts equivalent to native database operations like join or aggregation.[20] HANA developers can write R scripts in SQL and the types are automatically converted in HANA. R scripts can be invoked with HANA tables as both input and output in the SQLScript. R environments need to be deployed to use R within SQLScript
More blog posts on using SAP and R together
Dealing with R and HANAhttp://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2011/11/28/dealing-with-r-and-hana
R meets HANA
http://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2012/01/29/r-meets-hana
HANA meets R
http://scn.sap.com/community/in-memory-business-data-management/blog/2012/01/26/hana-meets-r
When SAP HANA met R – First kiss
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/hana/blog/2012/05/21/when-sap-hana-met-r–first-kiss
Using RODBC with SAP HANA DB-
SAP HANA: My experiences on using SAP HANA with R
and of course the blog that started it all-
Jitender Aswani’s http://allthingsr.blogspot.in/