Tag: cpu

New Amazon Instance: High I/O for NoSQL

Latest from the Amazon Cloud-

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

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

High I/O 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.

Interview Alain Chesnais Chief Scientist Trendspottr.com

Here is a brief interview with Alain Chesnais ,Chief Scientist  Trendspottr.com. It is a big honor to interview such a legend in computer science, and I am grateful to both him and Mark Zohar for taking time to write these down.
alain_chesnais2.jpg

Ajay-  Describe your career from your student days to being the President of ACM (Association of Computing Machinery http://www.acm.org/ ). How can we increase  the interest of students in STEM education, particularly in view of the shortage of data scientists.
 
Alain- I’m trying to sum up a career of over 35 years. This may be a bit long winded…
I started my career in CS when I was in high school in the early 70’s. I was accepted in the National Science Foundation’s Science Honors Program in 9th grade and the first course I took was a Fortran programming course at Columbia University. This was on an IBM 360 using punch cards.
The next year my high school got a donation from DEC of a PDP-8E mini computer. I ended up spending a lot of time in the machine room all through high school at a time when access to computers wasn’t all that common. I went to college in Paris and ended up at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in the newly created Computer Science department.
My first job after finishing my graduate studies was as a research assistant at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique where I focused my efforts on modelling the behaviour of distributed database systems in the presence of locking. When François Mitterand was elected president of France in 1981, he invited Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert to come to France to set up the Centre Mondial Informatique. I was hired as a researcher there and continued on to become director of software development until it was closed down in 1986. I then started up my own company focusing on distributed computer graphics. We sold the company to Abvent in the early 90’s.
After that, I was hired by Thomson Digital Image to lead their rendering team. We were acquired by Wavefront Technologies in 1993 then by SGI in 1995 and merged with Alias Research. In the merged company: Alias|wavefront, I was director of engineering on the Maya project. Our team received an Oscar in 2003 for the creation of the Maya software system.
Since then I’ve worked at various companies, most recently focusing on social media and Big Data issues associated with it. Mark Zohar and I worked together at SceneCaster in 2007 where we developed a Facebook app that allowed users to create their own 3D scenes and share them with friends via Facebook without requiring a proprietary plugin. In December 2007 it was the most popular app in its category on Facebook.
Recently Mark approached me with a concept related to mining the content of public tweets to determine what was trending in real time. Using math similar to what I had developed during my graduate studies to model the performance of distributed databases in the presence of locking, we built up a real time analytics engine that ranks the content of tweets as they stream in. The math is designed to scale linearly in complexity with the volume of data that we analyze. That is the basis for what we have created for TrendSpottr.
In parallel to my professional career, I have been a very active volunteer at ACM. I started out as a member of the Paris ACM SIGGRAPH chapter in 1985 and volunteered to help do our mailings (snail mail at the time). After taking on more responsibilities with the chapter, I was elected chair of the chapter in 1991. I was first appointed to the SIGGRAPH Local Groups Steering Committee, then became ACM Director for Chapters. Later I was successively elected SIGGRAPH Vice Chair, ACM SIG Governing Board (SGB) Vice Chair for Operations, SGB Chair, ACM SIGGRAPH President, ACM Secretary/Treasurer, ACM Vice President, and finally, in 2010, I was elected ACM President. My term as ACM President has just ended on July 1st. Vint Cerf is our new President. I continue to serve on the ACM Executive Committee in my role as immediate Past President.
(Note- About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. )
Ajay- What sets Trendspotter apart from other startups out there in terms of vision in trying to achieve a more coherent experience on the web.
 
Alain- The Basic difference with other approaches that we are aware of is that we have developed an incremental solution that calculates the results on the fly as the data streams in. Our evaluators are based on solid mathematical foundations that have proven their usefulness over time. One way to describe what we do is to think of it as signal processing where the tweets are the signal and our evaluators are like triggers that tell you what elements of the signal have the characteristics that we are filtering for (velocity and acceleration). One key result of using this approach is that our unit cost per tweet analyzed does not go up with increased volume. Using more traditional data analysis approaches involving an implicit sort would imply a complexity of N*log(N), where N is the volume of tweets being analyzed. That would imply that the cost per tweet analyzed would go up with the volume of tweets. Our approach was designed to avoid that, so that we can maintain a cap on our unit costs of analysis, no matter what volume of data we analyze.
Ajay- What do you think is the future of big data visualization going to look like? What are some of the technologies that you are currently bullish on?
Alain- I see several trends that would have deep impact on Big Data visualization. I firmly believe that with large amounts of data, visualization is key tool for understanding both the structure and the relationships that exist between data elements. Let’s focus on some of the key things that are pushing in this direction:
  • the volume of data that is available is growing at a rate we have never seen before. Cisco has measured an 8 fold increase in the volume of IP traffic over the last 5 years and predicts that we will reach the zettabyte of data over IP in 2016
  • more of the data is becoming publicly available. This isn’t only on social networks such as Facebook and twitter, but joins a more general trend involving open research initiatives and open government programs
  • the desired time to get meaningful results is going down dramatically. In the past 5 years we have seen the half life of data on Facebook, defined as the amount of time that half of the public reactions to any given post (likes, shares., comments) take place, go from about 12 hours to under 3 hours currently
  • our access to the net is always on via mobile device. You are always connected.
  • the CPU and GPU capabilities of mobile devices is huge (an iPhone has 10 times the compute power of a Cray-1 and more graphics capabilities than early SGI workstations)
Put all of these observations together and you quickly come up with a massive opportunity to analyze data visually on the go as it happens no matter where you are. We can’t afford to have to wait for results. When something of interest occurs we need to be aware of it immediately.
Ajay- What are some of the applications we could use Trendspottr. Could we predict events like Arab Spring, or even the next viral thing.
 
Alain- TrendSpottr won’t predict what will happen next. What it *will* do is alert you immediately when it happens. You can think of it like a smoke detector. It doesn’t tell that a fire will take place, but it will save your life when a fire does break out.
Typical uses for TrendSpottr are
  • thought leadership by tracking content that your readership is interested in via TrendSpottr you can be seen as a thought leader on the subject by being one of the first to share trending content on a given subject. I personally do this on my Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/alain.chesnais) and have seen my klout score go up dramatically as a result
  • brand marketing to be able to know when something is trending about your brand and take advantage of it as it happens.
  • competitive analysis to see what is being said about two competing elements. For instance, searching TrendSpottr for “Obama OR Romney” gives you a very good understanding about how social networks are reacting to each politician. You can also do searches like “$aapl OR $msft OR $goog” to get a sense of what is the current buzz for certain hi tech stocks.
  • understanding your impact in real time to be able to see which of the content that you are posting is trending the most on social media so that you can highlight it on your main page. So if all of your content is hosted on common domain name (ourbrand.com), searching for ourbrand.com will show you the most active of your site’s content. That can easily be set up by putting a TrendSpottr widget on your front page

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.

 
Alain- We take privacy very seriously and anonymize all of the data that we collect. We don’t keep explicit records of the data we collected through the various incoming streams and only store the aggregate results of our analysis.
About–
Alain Chesnais is immediate Past President of ACM, elected for the two-year term beginning July 1, 2010.Chesnais studied at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure de l’Enseignement Technique and l’Université de Paris where he earned a Maîtrise de Mathematiques, a Maitrise de Structure Mathématique de l’Informatique, and a Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondies in Compuer Science. He was a high school student at the United Nations International School in New York, where, along with preparing his International Baccalaureate with a focus on Math, Physics and Chemistry, he also studied Mandarin Chinese.Chesnais recently founded Visual Transitions, which specializes in helping companies move to HTML 5, the newest standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. He was the CTO of SceneCaster.com from June 2007 until April 2010, and was Vice President of Product Development at Tucows Inc. from July 2005 – May 2007. He also served as director of engineering at Alias|Wavefront on the team that received an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for developing the Maya 3D software package.

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.

About Trendspottr.com

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 Ec2 goes Red Hat

message from Amazing Amazon’s cloud team- this will also help for #rstats users given that revolution Analytics full versions on RHEL.

—————————————————-

on-demand instances of Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for as little as $0.145 per instance hour. The offering combines the cost-effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of running in Amazon EC2 with the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Highlights of the offering include:

  • Support is included through subscription to AWS Premium Support with back-line support by Red Hat
  • Ongoing maintenance, including security patches and bug fixes, via update repositories available in all Amazon EC2 regions
  • Amazon EC2 running RHEL currently supports RHEL 5.5, RHEL 5.6, RHEL 6.0 and RHEL 6.1 in both 32 bit and 64 bit formats, and is available in all Regions.
  • Customers who already own Red Hat licenses will continue to be able to use those licenses at no additional charge.
  • Like all services offered by AWS, Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a low-cost, pay-as-you-go model with no long-term commitments and no minimum fees.

For more information, please visit the Amazon EC2 Red Hat Enterprise Linux page.

which is

Amazon EC2 Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a dependable platform to deploy a broad range of applications. By running RHEL on EC2, you can leverage the cost effectiveness, scalability and flexibility of Amazon EC2, the proven reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and AWS premium support with back-line support from Red Hat.. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 is available in versions 5.5, 5.6, 6.0, and 6.1, both in 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Amazon EC2 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides seamless integration with existing Amazon EC2 features including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic-Load Balancing, and Elastic IPs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances are available in multiple Availability Zones in all Regions.

Sign Up

Pricing

Pay only for what you use with no long-term commitments and no minimum fee.

On-Demand Instances

On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments.

Region:US – N. VirginiaUS – N. CaliforniaEU – IrelandAPAC – SingaporeAPAC – Tokyo
Standard Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Small (Default) $0.145 per hour
Large $0.40 per hour
Extra Large $0.74 per hour
Micro Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Micro $0.08 per hour
High-Memory Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Extra Large $0.56 per hour
Double Extra Large $1.06 per hour
Quadruple Extra Large $2.10 per hour
High-CPU Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Medium $0.23 per hour
Extra Large $0.78 per hour
Cluster Compute Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Quadruple Extra Large $1.70 per hour
Cluster GPU Instances Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Quadruple Extra Large $2.20 per hour

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

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and

Available Instance Types

Standard Instances

Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.

Small Instance – default*

1.7 GB memory
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m1.small

Large Instance

7.5 GB memory
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.large

Extra Large Instance

15 GB memory
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m1.xlarge

Micro Instances

Instances of this family provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

Micro Instance

613 MB memory
Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts)
EBS storage only
32-bit or 64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Low
API name: t1.micro

High-Memory Instances

Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.

High-Memory Extra Large Instance

17.1 GB of memory
6.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
420 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: m2.xlarge

High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance

34.2 GB of memory
13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.2xlarge

High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance

68.4 GB of memory
26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: m2.4xlarge

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

High-CPU Medium Instance

1.7 GB of memory
5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
350 GB of instance storage
32-bit platform
I/O Performance: Moderate
API name: c1.medium

High-CPU Extra Large Instance

7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: High
API name: c1.xlarge

Cluster Compute Instances

Instances of this family provide proportionally high CPU resources with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.

Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large Instance

23 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cc1.4xlarge

Cluster GPU Instances

Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.

Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large Instance

22 GB of memory
33.5 EC2 Compute Units (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, quad-core “Nehalem” architecture)
2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
I/O Performance: Very High (10 Gigabit Ethernet)
API name: cg1.4xlarge

 

Getting Started

To get started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2, perform the following steps:

  • Open and log into the AWS Management Console
  • Click on Launch Instance from the EC2 Dashboard
  • Select the Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMI from the QuickStart tab
  • Specify additional details of your instance and click Launch
  • Additional details can be found on each AMI’s Catalog Entry page

The AWS Management Console is an easy tool to start and manage your instances. If you are looking for more details on launching an instance, a quick video tutorial on how to use Amazon EC2 with the AWS Management Console can be found here .
A full list of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AMIs can be found in the AWS AMI Catalog.

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Support

All customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2 will receive access to repository updates from Red Hat. Moreover, AWS Premium support customers can contact AWS to get access to a support structure from both Amazon and Red Hat.

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Resources

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About Red Hat

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide.

 

also from Revolution Analytics- in case you want to #rstats in the cloud and thus kill all that talk of RAM dependency, slow R than other softwares (just increase the RAM above in the instances to keep it simple)

,or Revolution not being open enough

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/downloads/gpl-sources.php

GPL SOURCES

Revolution Analytics uses an Open-Core Licensing model. We provide open- source R bundled with proprietary modules from Revolution Analytics that provide additional functionality for our users. Open-source R is distributed under the GNU Public License (version 2), and we make our software available under a commercial license.

Revolution Analytics respects the importance of open source licenses and has contributed code to the open source R project and will continue to do so. We have carefully reviewed our compliance with GPLv2 and have worked with Mark Radcliffe of DLA Piper, the outside General Legal Counsel of the Open Source Initiative, to ensure that we fully comply with the obligations of the GPLv2.

For our Revolution R distribution, we may make some minor modifications to the R sources (the ChangeLog file lists all changes made). You can download these modified sources of open-source R under the terms of the GPLv2, using either the links below or those in the email sent to you when you download a specific version of Revolution R.

Download GPL Sources

Product Version Platform Modified R Sources
Revolution R Community 3.2 Windows R 2.10.1
Revolution R Community 3.2 MacOS R 2.10.1
Revolution R Enterprise 3.1.1 RHEL R 2.9.2
Revolution R Enterprise 4.0 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 RHEL R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.1.0 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 Windows R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.2 RHEL R 2.11.1
Revolution R Enterprise 4.3 Windows & RHEL R 2.12.2

 

 

 

Protected: Using SAS and C/C++ together

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WPS Version 2.5.1 Released – can still run SAS language/data and R

However this is what Phil Rack the reseller is quoting on http://www.minequest.com/Pricing.html

Windows Desktop Price: $884 on 32-bit Windows and $1,149 on 64-bit Windows.

The Bridge to R is available on the Windows platforms and is available for free to customers who
license WPS through MineQuest,LLC. Companies and organizations outside of North America
may purchase a license for the Bridge to R which starts at $199 per desktop or $599 per server

Windows Server Price: $1,903 per logical CPU for 32-bit and $2,474 for 64-bit.

Note that Linux server versions are available but do not yet support the Eclipse IDE and are
command line only

WPS sure seems going well-but their pricing is no longer fixed and on the home website, you gotta fill a form. Ditt0 for the 30 day free evaluation

http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/modules/core

Data File Formats

The table below provides a summary of data formats presently supported by the WPS Core module.

Data File Format Un-Compressed
Data		 Compressed
Data
Read Write Read Write
SD2 (SAS version 6 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 7 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 8 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 9 data set)
SASSEQ (SAS version 8/9 sequential file)
V8SEQ (SAS version 8 sequential file)
V9SEQ (SAS version 9 sequential file)
WPD (WPS native data set)
WPDSEQ (WPS native sequential file)
XPORT (transport format)

Additional access to EXCEL, SPSS and dBASE files is supported by utilising the WPS Engine for DB Filesmodule.

and they have a new product release on Valentine Day 2011 (oh these Europeans!)

From the press release at http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/press/wps2_5_1_released

WPS Version 2.5.1 Released 

New language support, new data engines, larger datasets, improved scalability

LONDON, UK – 14 February 2011 – World Programming today released version 2.5.1 of their WPS software for workstations, servers and mainframes.

WPS is a competitively priced, high performance, highly scalable data processing and analytics software product that allows users to execute programs written in the language of SAS. WPS is supported on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms and can connect to and work with many types of data with ease. The WPS user interface (Workbench) is frequently praised for its ease of use and flexibility, with the option to include numerous third-party extensions.

This latest version of the software has the ability to manipulate even greater volumes of data, removing the previous 2^31 (2 billion) limit on number of observations.

Complimenting extended data processing capabilities, World Programming has worked hard to boost the performance, scalability and reliability of the WPS software to give users the confidence they need to run heavy workloads whilst delivering maximum value from available computer power.

WPS version 2.5.1 offers additional flexibility with the release of two new data engines for accessing Greenplum and SAND databases. WPS now comes with eleven data engines and can access a huge range of commonly used and industry-standard file-formats and databases.

Support in WPS for the language of SAS continues to expand with more statistical procedures, data step functions, graphing controls and many other language items and options.

WPS version 2.5.1 is available as a free upgrade to all licensed users of WPS.

Summary of Main New Features:

  • Supporting Even Larger Datasets
    WPS is now able to process very large data sets by lifting completely the previous size limit of 2^31 observations.
  • Performance and Scalability Boosted
    Performance and scalability improvements across the board combine to ensure even the most demanding large and concurrent workloads are processed efficiently and reliably.
  • More Language Support
    WPS 2.5.1 continues the expansion of it’s language support with over 70 new language items, including new Procedures, Data Step functions and many other language items and options.
  • Statistical Analysis
    The procedure support in WPS Statistics has been expanded to include PROC CLUSTER and PROC TREE.
  • Graphical Output
    The graphical output from WPS Graphing has been expanded to accommodate more configurable graphics.
  • Hash Tables
    Support is now provided for hash tables.
  • Greenplum®
    A new WPS Engine for Greenplum provides dedicated support for accessing the Greenplum database.
  • SAND®
    A new WPS Engine for SAND provides dedicated support for accessing the SAND database.
  • Oracle®
    Bulk loading support now available in the WPS Engine for Oracle.
  • SQL Server®
    To enhance existing SQL Server database access, a new SQLSERVR (please note spelling) facility in the ODBC engine.

More Information:

Existing Users should visit www.teamwpc.co.uk/support/wps/release where you can download a readme file containing more information about all the new features and fixes in WPS 2.5.1.

New Users should visit www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps where you can explore in more detail all the features available in WPS or request a free evaluation.

and from http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/data it seems they are going on the BIG DATA submarine as well-

Data Support 

Extremely Large Data Size Handling

WPS is now able to handle extremely large data sets now that the previous limit of 2^31 observations has been lifted.

Access Standard Databases

Use I/O Features in WPS Core

  • CLIPBOARD (Windows only)
  • DDE (Windows only)
  • EMAIL (via SMTP or MAPI)
  • FTP
  • HTTP
  • PIPE (Windows and UNIX only)
  • SOCKET
  • STDIO
  • URL

Use Standard Data File Formats

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HP goes GPU, Will software people follow

A graphics processing unit on an Nvidia GeForc...
Image via Wikipedia

One more addition to the GPU stack that adds up power when combined with CPU and GPUs. For numeric computing, it may be essential to have GPU- CPU mixed software as almost all hardware people now have offered GPU-CPU products. Maybe software companies can get inspired for new kind of GPU-CPU blade server software again.

Source-

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/HP-Adds-New-HPC-Server-with-GPGPU-Option-104381494.html

But for “true” supercomputing applications, the SL390s G7 is the go-to server. Like its sibling, the SL390s comes with Xeon 5600 processors, but the option to pair the CPUs with up to three on-board NVIDIA “Fermi” 20-series GPUs puts a lot more floating point performance into this design. Customers can choose from either the M2050 or M2070 Tesla GPU modules, the only difference being the amount of graphics memory — 3 GB of GDDR5 for the M2050 versus 6 GB for the M2070. Each GPU module is served by its own PCIe Gen2 x16 channel in order to maximize bandwidth to the graphics chips. At the maximum configuration with all three Fermi GPUs and two Westmere CPUs, a single server delivers on the order of 1 teraflop of double precision performance. “So this is very much a server that has been designed for HPC,” said Turkel.

With GPUs on board, the SL390s fill out a 2U half-width tray, so up to four of these can be packed into a 4U SL6500 chassis. A CPU-only version is also available and takes up just half the space (half-width 1U), enabling twice as many Xeons to occupy the same chassis. This configuration will likely be the server of choice for the majority of HPC setups, given that GPGPU deployment is really just getting started. Pricing on the CPU-only model starts at $2,259.

And

, the ProLiant SL390s G7, provides more raw FLOPS per square inch than any server HP has delivered to date, and is the basis for the 2.4 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer currently being deployed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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Revolution R for Linux

Screenshot of the Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop
Image via Wikipedia

New software just released from the guys in California (@RevolutionR) so if you are a Linux user and have academic credentials you can download it for free  (@Cmastication doesnt), you can test it to see what the big fuss is all about (also see http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/benchmarks.php) –

Revolution Analytics has just released Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a significant step forward in enterprise data analytics. Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 is built on R 2.11.1, the latest release of the open-source environment for data analysis and graphics. Also available is the initial release of our deployment server solution, RevoDeployR 1.0, designed to help you deliver R analytics via the Web. And coming soon to Linux: RevoScaleR, a new package for fast and efficient multi-core processing of large data sets.

As a registered user of the Academic version of Revolution R Enterprise for Linux, you can take advantage of these improvements by downloading and installing Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 today. You can install Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 side-by-side with your existing Revolution R Enterprise installations; there is no need to uninstall previous versions.

Download Information

The following information is all you will need to download and install the Academic Edition.

Supported Platforms:

Revolution R Enterprise Academic edition and RevoDeployR are supported on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.4 or greater (64-bit processors).

Approximately 300MB free disk space is required for a full install of Revolution R Enterprise. We recommend at least 1GB of RAM to use Revolution R Enterprise.

For the full list of system requirements for RevoDeployR, refer to the RevoDeployR™ Installation Guide for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.

Download Links:

You will first need to download the Revolution R Enterprise installer.

Installation Instructions for Revolution R Enterprise Academic Edition

After downloading the installer, do the following to install the software:

  • Log in as root if you have not already.
  • Change directory to the directory containing the downloaded installer.
  • Unpack the installer using the following command:
    tar -xzf Revo-Ent-4.0.1-RHEL5-desktop.tar.gz
  • Change directory to the RevolutionR_4.0.1 directory created.
  • Run the installer by typing ./install.py and following the on-screen prompts.

Getting Started with the Revolution R Enterprise

After you have installed the software, launch Revolution R Enterprise by typing Revo64 at the shell prompt.

Documentation is available in the form of PDF documents installed as part of the Revolution R Enterprise distribution. Type Revo.home(“doc”) at the R prompt to locate the directory containing the manuals Getting Started with Revolution R (RevoMan.pdf) and the ParallelR User’s Guide(parRman.pdf).

Installation Instructions for RevoDeployR (and RServe)

After downloading the RevoDeployR distribution, use the following steps to install the software:

Note: These instructions are for an automatic install.  For more details or for manual install instructions, refer to RevoDeployR_Installation_Instructions_for_RedHat.pdf.

  1. Log into the operating system as root.
    su –
  2. Change directory to the directory containing the downloaded distribution for RevoDeployR and RServe.
  3. Unzip the contents of the RevoDeployR tar file. At prompt, type:
    tar -xzf deployrRedHat.tar.gz
  4. Change directories. At the prompt, type:
    cd installFiles
  5. Launch the automated installation script and follow the on-screen prompts. At the prompt, type:
    ./installRedHat.sh
    Note: Red Hat installs MySQL without a password.

Getting Started with RevoDeployR

After installing RevoDeployR, you will be directed to the RevoDeployR landing page. The landing page has links to documentation, the RevoDeployR management console, the API Explorer development tool, and sample code.

Support

For help installing this Academic Edition, please email support@revolutionanalytics.com

Also interestingly some benchmarks on Revolution R vs R.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/benchmarks.php

R-25 Benchmarks

The simple R-benchmark-25.R test script is a quick-running survey of general R performance. The Community-developed test consists of three sets of small benchmarks, referred to in the script as Matrix Calculation, Matrix Functions, and Program Control.

R-25 Matrix Calculation R-25 Matrix Functions R-Matrix Program Control
R-25 Benchmarks Base R 2.9.2 Revolution R (1-core) Revolution R (4-core) Speedup (4 core)
Matrix Calculation 34 sec 6.6 sec 4.4 sec 7.7x
Matrix Functions 20 sec 4.4 sec 2.1 sec 9.5x
Program Control 4.7 sec 4 sec 4.2 sec Not Appreciable

Speedup = Slower time / Faster Time – 1   Test descriptions available at http://r.research.att.com/benchmarks

Additional Benchmarks

Revolution Analytics has created its own tests to simulate common real-world computations.  Their descriptions are explained below.

Matrix Multiply Cholesky Factorization
Singular Value Decomposition Principal Component Analysis Linear Discriminant Analysis
Linear Algebra Computation Base R 2.9.2 Revolution R (1-core) Revolution R (4-core) Speedup (4 core)
Matrix Multiply 243 sec 22 sec 5.9 sec 41x
Cholesky Factorization 23 sec 3.8 sec 1.1 sec 21x
Singular Value Decomposition 62 sec 13 sec 4.9 sec 12.6x
Principal Components Analysis 237 sec 41 sec 15.6 sec 15.2x
Linear Discriminant Analysis 142 sec 49 sec 32.0 sec 4.4x

Speedup = Slower time / Faster Time – 1

Matrix Multiply

This routine creates a random uniform 10,000 x 5,000 matrix A, and then times the computation of the matrix product transpose(A) * A.

set.seed (1)
m <- 10000
n <-  5000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (B <- crossprod(A))

The system will respond with a message in this format:

User   system elapsed
37.22    0.40   9.68

The “elapsed” times indicate total wall-clock time to run the timed code.

The table above reflects the elapsed time for this and the other benchmark tests. The test system was an INTEL® Xeon® 8-core CPU (model X55600) at 2.5 GHz with 18 GB system RAM running Windows Server 2008 operating system. For the Revolution R benchmarks, the computations were limited to 1 core and 4 cores by calling setMKLthreads(1) and setMKLthreads(4) respectively. Note that Revolution R performs very well even in single-threaded tests: this is a result of the optimized algorithms in the Intel MKL library linked to Revolution R. The slight greater than linear speedup may be due to the greater total cache available to all CPU cores, or simply better OS CPU scheduling–no attempt was made to pin execution threads to physical cores. Consult Revolution R’s documentation to learn how to run benchmarks that use less cores than your hardware offers.

Cholesky Factorization

The Cholesky matrix factorization may be used to compute the solution of linear systems of equations with a symmetric positive definite coefficient matrix, to compute correlated sets of pseudo-random numbers, and other tasks. We re-use the matrix B computed in the example above:

system.time (C <- chol(B))

Singular Value Decomposition with Applications

The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a numerically-stable and very useful matrix decompisition. The SVD is often used to compute Principal Components and Linear Discriminant Analysis.

# Singular Value Deomposition
m <- 10000
n <- 2000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (S <- svd (A,nu=0,nv=0))

# Principal Components Analysis
m <- 10000
n <- 2000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (P <- prcomp(A))

# Linear Discriminant Analysis
require (‘MASS’)
g <- 5
k <- round (m/2)
A <- data.frame (A, fac=sample (LETTERS[1:g],m,replace=TRUE))
train <- sample(1:m, k)
system.time (L <- lda(fac ~., data=A, prior=rep(1,g)/g, subset=train))

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