Tag: North Carolina

Amazon goes HPC and GPU: Dirk E to revise his R HPC book

Looking south above Interstate 80, the Eastsho...
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Amazon just did a cluster Christmas present for us tech geek lizards- before Google could out doogle them with end of the Betas (cough- its on NDA)

Clusters used by Academic Departments now have a great chance to reduce cost without downsizing- but only if the CIO gets the email.

While Professor Goodnight of SAS / North Carolina University is still playing time sharing versus mind sharing games with analytical birdies – his 70 mill server farm set in Feb last is about to get ready

( I heard they got public subsidies for environment- but thats historic for SAS– taking public things private -right Prof as SAS itself began as a publicly funded project. and that was in the 1960s and they didnt even have no lobbyists as well. )

In realted R news, Dirk E has been thinking of a R HPC book without paying attention to Amazon but would now have to include Amazon

(he has been thinking of writing that book for 5 years, but hey he’s got a day job, consulting gigs with revo, photo ops at Google, a blog, packages to maintain without binaries, Dirk E we await thy book with bated holes.

Whos Dirk E – well http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/ is like the Terminator of R project (in terms of unpronounceable surnames)

Back to the cause du jeure-

 

From http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/ but minus corporate buzz words.

 

Unique to Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances is the ability to group them into clusters of instances for use with HPC

applications. This is particularly valuable for those applications that rely on protocols like Message Passing Interface (MPI) for tightly coupled inter-node communication.

Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances function just like other Amazon EC2 instances but also offer the following features for optimal performance with HPC applications:

  • When run as a cluster of instances, they provide low latency, full bisection 10 Gbps bandwidth between instances. Cluster sizes up through and above 128 instances are supported.
  • Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances include the specific processor architecture in their definition to allow developers to tune their applications by compiling applications for that specific processor architecture in order to achieve optimal performance.

The Cluster Compute instance family currently contains a single instance type, the Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large with the following specifications:

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

The Cluster GPU instance family currently contains a single instance type, the Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large with the following specifications:

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

.

Sign Up for Amazon EC2
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John Sall sets JMP 9 free to tango with R

 

Diagnostic graphs produced by plot.lm() functi...
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John Sall, founder SAS AND JMP , has released the latest blockbuster edition of flagship of JMP 9 (JMP Stands for John’s Macintosh Program).

To kill all birds with one software, it is integrated with R and SAS, and the brochure frankly lists all the qualities. Why am I excited for JMP 9 integration with R and with SAS- well it integrates bigger datasets manipulation (thanks to SAS) with R’s superb library of statistical packages and a great statistical GUI (JMP). This makes JMP the latest software apart from SAS/IML, Rapid Miner,Knime, Oracle Data Miner to showcase it’s R integration (without getting into the GPL compliance need for showing source code– it does not ship R- and advises you to just freely download R). I am sure Peter Dalgaard, and Frankie Harell are all overjoyed that R Base and Hmisc packages would be used by fellow statisticians  and students for JMP- which after all is made in the neighborhood state of North Carolina.

Best of all a JMP 30 day trial is free- so no money lost if you download JMP 9 (and no they dont ask for your credit card number, or do they- but they do have a huuuuuuge form to register before you download. Still JMP 9 the software itself is more thoughtfully designed than the email-prospect-leads-form and the extra functionality in the free 30 day trial is worth it.

Also see “New Features  in JMP 9  http://www.jmp.com/software/jmp9/pdf/new_features.pdf

which has this regarding R.

Working with R

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. JMP now  supports a set of JSL functions to access R. The JSL functions provide the following options:

• open and close a connection between JMP and R

• exchange data between JMP and R

•submit R code for execution

•display graphics produced by R

JMP and R each have their own sets of computational methods.

R has some methods that JMP does not have. Using JSL functions, you can connect to R and use these R computational methods from within JMP.

Textual output and error messages from R appear in the log window.R must be installed on the same computer as JMP.

JMP is not distributed with a copy of R. You can download R from the Comprehensive R Archive Network Web site:http://cran.r-project.org

Because JMP is supported as both a 32-bit and a 64-bit Windows application, you must install the corresponding 32-bit or 64-bit version of R.

For details, see the Scripting Guide book.

and the download trial page ( search optimized URL) –

http://www.sas.com/apps/demosdownloads/jmptrial9_PROD__sysdep.jsp?packageID=000717&jmpflag=Y

In related news (Richest man in North Carolina also ranks nationally(charlotte.news14.com) , Jim Goodnight is now just as rich as Mark Zuckenberg, creator of Facebook-

though probably they are not creating a movie on Jim yet (imagine a movie titled “The Statistical Software” -not just the same dude feel as “The Social Network”)

See John’s latest interview :

The People Behind the Software: John Sall

http://blogs.sas.com/jmp/index.php?/archives/352-The-People-Behind-the-Software-John-Sall.html

Interview John Sall Founder JMP/SAS Institute

https://decisionstats.com/2009/07/28/interview-john-sall-jmp/

SAS Early Days

https://decisionstats.com/2010/06/02/sas-early-days/

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SAS announcement in education initiatives

From the Research Triangle, some pleasant and positive news- http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2010/10/04/daily27.html

“As a high tech company, SAS depends on a strong educational system for its long-term success,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. “Beyond that, STEM education – developing skills for a knowledge economy – is critical to American competitiveness. Without emphasis on STEM, we sacrifice innovation and export our knowledge jobs to other countries.”

Goodnight and SAS have been active in education for years. The SAS co-founder and his wife, Ann Goodnight, launched college prep school Cary Academy in 1996, and the SAS inSchool program has developed educational software for schools since the mid-1990s. In 2008, Jim Goodnight made SAS Curriculum Pathways available free to all U.S. educators. The web-based service provides content in English, mathematics, social studies, science and Spanish.

SAS is the only Triangle-based company among the Change the Equation corporate partners, but the group includes several other companies with a significant Raleigh-Durham presence: chief among them IBM (NYSE: IBM), GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK), and Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO).

Read the full article at http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2010/10/04/daily27.html

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Read more: SAS joins IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems in Obama education effort – Triangle Business Journal

 

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