Tag: H2O

Spark is the Future of Analytics

At the 2016 Spark Summit, Gartner Research Director Nick Heudecker asked: Is Spark the Future of Data Analysis?  It’s an interesting question, and it requires a little parsing. Nobody believes that Spark alone is the future of data analysis, even its most ardent proponents. A better way to frame the question: Does Spark have a role in the future of analytics? What is that role?

Unfortunately, Heudecker didn’t address the question but spent the hour throwing shade at Spark.

Spark is overhyped! He declared. His evidence? This:

screen-shot-2017-02-09-at-2-58-05-pm

One might question an analysis that equates real things like optimization with fake things like “Citizen Data Science.” Gartner’s Hype Cycle by itself proves nothing; it’s a conceptual salad, with neither empirical foundation nor predictive power.

If you want to argue that Spark is overhyped, produce some false or misleading claims by project principals, or documented cases where the software failed to work as claimed. It’s possible that such cases exist. Personally, I don’t know of any, and neither does Nick Heudecker, or he would have included them in his presentation.

Instead, he cited a Gartner survey showing that organizations don’t use Spark and Flink as much as they use other tools for data analysis. From my notes, here are the percentages:

  • EDW: 57%
  • Cloud: 44%
  • Hadoop: 42%
  • Stat Packages: 32%
  • Spark or Flink: 9%
  • Graph Databases: 8%

That 42% figure for Hadoop is interesting. In 2015, Gartner concern-trolled the tech community, trumpeting the finding that “only” 26% of respondents in a survey said they were “deploying, piloting or experimenting with Hadoop.” So — either Hadoop adoption grew from 26% to 42% in a year, or Gartner doesn’t know how to do surveys.

In any event, it’s irrelevant; statistical packages have been available for 40 years, EDWs for 25, Spark for 3. The current rate of adoption for a project in its youth tells you very little about its future. It’s like arguing that a toddler is cognitively challenged because she can’t do integral calculus without checking the Wolfram app on her iPad.

Heudecker closed his presentation with the pronouncement that he had no idea whether or not Spark is the future of data analysis, and bolted the venue faster than a jackrabbit on Ecstasy. Which begs the question: why pay big bucks for analysts who have no opinion about one of the most active projects in the Big Data ecosystem?

Here are eight reasons why Spark has a central role in the future of analytics.

(1) Nearly everyone who uses Hadoop will use Spark.

If you believe that 42% of enterprises use Hadoop, you must believe that 41.9% will use Spark. Every Hadoop distribution includes Spark. Hive and Pig run on Spark. Hadoop early adopters will gradually replace existing MapReduce applications and build most new applications in Spark. Late adopters may never use MapReduce.

The only holdouts for MapReduce will be those who want their analysis the way they want their barbecue: low and slow.

Of course, Hadoop adoption isn’t static. Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri argues that 100% of enterprises will use Hadoop within a few years.

(2) Lots of people who don’t use Hadoop will use Spark.

For Hadoop users, Spark is a fast replacement for MapReduce. But that’s not all it is. Spark is also a general-purpose data processing environment for advanced analytics. Hadoop has baggage that data science teams don’t need, so it’s no surprise to see that most Spark users aren’t using it with Hadoop. One of the key advantages of Spark is that users aren’t tied to a particular storage back end, but can choose from many different options. That’s essential in real-world data science.

(3) For scalable open source data science, Spark is the only game in town.

If you want to argue that Spark has no future, you’re going to have to name an alternative. I’ll give you a minute to think of something.

Time’s up.

You could try to approximate Spark’s capabilities with a collection of other projects: for example, you could use Presto for SQL, H2O for machine learning, Storm for streaming, and Giraph for graph analysis. Good luck pulling those together. H2O.ai was one of the first vendors to build an interface to Spark because even if you want to use H2O for machine learning, you’re still going to use Spark for data wrangling.

“What about Flink?” you ask. Well, what about it? Flink may have a future, too, if anyone ever supports it other than ten guys in a loft on the Tempelhofer Ufer. Flink’s event-based runtime seems well-suited for “pure” streaming applications, but that’s low-value bottom-of-the-stack stuff. Flink’s ML library is still pretty limited, and improving it doesn’t appear to be a high priority for the Flink team.

(4) Data scientists who work exclusively with “small data” still need Spark.

Data scientists satisfy most business requests for insight with small datasets that can fit into memory on a single machine. Even if you measure your largest dataset in gigabytes, however, there are two ways you need Spark: to create your analysis dataset and to parallelize operations.

Your analysis dataset may be small, but it comes from a larger pool of enterprise data. Unless you have servants to pull data for you, at some point you’re going to have to get your hands dirty and deal with data at enterprise scale. If you are lucky, your organization has nice clean data in a well-organized data warehouse that has everything anyone will ever need in a single source of truth.

Ha ha! Just kidding. Single sources of truth don’t exist, except in the wildest fantasies of data warehouse vendors. In reality, you’re going to muck around with many different sources and integrate your analysis data on the fly. Spark excels at that.

For best results, machine learning projects require hundreds of experiments to identify the best algorithm and optimal parameters. If you run those tests serially, it will take forever; distribute them across a Spark cluster, and you can radically reduce the time needed to find that optimal model.

(5) The Spark team isn’t resting on its laurels.

Over time, Spark has evolved from a research project for scalable machine learning to a general purpose data processing framework. Driven by user feedback, Spark has added SQL and streaming capabilities, introduced Python and R APIs, re-engineered the machine learning libraries, and many other enhancements.

Here are some projects under way to improve Spark:

— Project Tungsten, an ongoing effort to optimize CPU and memory utilization.

— A stable serialization format (possibly Apache Arrow) for external code integration.

— Integration with deep learning frameworks, including TensorFlow and Intel’s new BigDL library.

— A cost-based optimizer for Spark SQL.

— Improved interfaces to data sources.

— Continuing improvements to the Python and R APIs.

Performance improvement is an ongoing mission; for selected operations, Spark 2.0 runs 10X faster than Spark 1.6.

(6) More cool stuff is on the way.

Berkeley’s AMPLab, the source of Spark, Mesos, and Tachyon/Alluxio, is now RISELab. There are four projects under way at RISELab that will extend Spark capabilities:

— Clipper is a prediction serving system that brokers between machine learning frameworks and end-user applications. The first Alpha release, planned for mid-April 2017, will serve scikit-learn, Spark ML and Spark MLLib models, and arbitrary Python functions.

— Drizzle, an execution engine for Apache Spark, uses group scheduling to reduce latency in streaming and iterative operations. Lead developer Shivaram Venkataraman has filed a design document to implement this approach in Spark.

— Opaque is a package for Spark SQL that uses Intel SGX trusted hardware to deliver strong security for DataFrames. The project seeks to enable analytics on sensitive data in an untrusted cloud, with data encryption and access pattern hiding.

— Ray is a distributed execution engine for Spark designed for reinforcement learning.

Three Apache projects in the Incubator build on Spark:

— Apache Hivemall is a scalable machine learning library implemented as a collection of Hive UDFs designed to run on Hive, Pig or Spark SQL with MapReduce, Tez or Spark.

— Apache PredictionIO is a machine learning server built on top of an open source stack, including Spark, HBase, Spray, and Elasticsearch.

— Apache SystemML is a library of machine learning algorithms that run on Spark and MapReduce, originally developed by IBM Research.

MIT’s CSAIL lab is working on ModelDB, a system to manage machine learning models. ModelDB extracts and stores model artifacts and metadata, and makes this data available for easy querying and visualization. The current release supports Spark ML and scikit-learn.

(7) Commercial vendors are building on top of Spark.

The future of analytics is a hybrid stack, with open source at the bottom and commercial software for business users at the top. Here is a small sample of vendors who are building easy-to-use interfaces atop Spark.

— Alpine Data provides a collaboration environment for data science and machine learning that runs on Spark (and other platforms.)

— AtScale, an OLAP on Big Data solution, leverages Spark SQL and other SQL engines, including Hive, Impala, and Presto.

— Dataiku markets Data Science Studio, a drag-and-drop data science workflow tool with connectors for many different storage platforms, scikit-learn, Spark ML and XGboost.

— StreamAnalytix, a drag-and-drop platform for real-time analytics, supports Spark SQL and Spark Streaming, Apache Storm, and many different data sources and sinks.

— Zoomdata, an early adopter of Spark, offers an agile visualization tool that works with Spark Streaming and many other platforms.

All of the leading agile BI tools, including Tableau, Qlik, and PowerBI, support Spark. Even stodgy old Oracle’s Big Data Discovery tool runs on Spark in Oracle Cloud.

(8) All of the leading commercial advanced analytics platforms use Spark.

All of them, including SAS, a company that embraces open source the way Sylvester the Cat embraces a skunk. SAS supports Spark in SAS Data Loader for Hadoop, one of SAS’ five different Hadoop architectures. (If you don’t like SAS architecture, wait six months for another.)

screen-shot-2017-02-13-at-12-30-38-pm
Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms, 2016

— IBM embraces Spark like Romeo embraced Juliet, hopefully with a better ending. IBM contributes heavily to the Spark project and has rebuilt many of its software products and cloud services to use Spark.

— KNIME’s Spark Executor enables users of the KNIME Analytics Platform to create and execute Spark applications. Through a combination of visual programming and scripting, users can leverage Spark to access data sources, blend data, train predictive models, score new data, and embed Spark applications in a KNIME workflow.

— RapidMiner’s Radoop module supports visual programming across SparkR, PySpark, Pig, and HiveQL, and machine learning with SparkML and H2O.

— Statistica, which is no longer part of Dell, offers Spark integration in its Expert and Enterprise editions.

— Microsoft supports Spark in AzureHD, and it has rebuilt Microsoft R Server’s Hadoop integration to leverage Spark as well as MapReduce. VentureBeat reports that Databricks will offer its managed service for Spark on Microsoft Azure later this year.

— SAP, another early adopter of Spark, supports Vora, a connector to SAP HANA.

You get the idea. Spark is deeply embedded in the ecosystem, and it’s foolish to argue that it doesn’t play a central role in the future of analytics.

The Year in Machine Learning (Part Two)

This is the second installment in a four-part review of 2016 in machine learning and deep learning. Part One, here, covered general trends. In Part Two, we review the year in open source machine learning and deep learning projects. Parts Three and Four will cover commercial machine learning and deep learning software and services.

There are thousands of open source projects on the market today, and we cannot cover them all. We’ve selected the most relevant projects based on usage reported in surveys of data scientists, as well as development activity recorded in OpenHub.  In this post, we limit the scope to projects with a non-profit governance structure, and those offered by commercial ventures that do not also provide licensed software. Part Three will include software vendors who offer open source “community” editions together with commercially licensed software.

R and Python maintained their leadership as primary tools for open data science. The Python versus R debate continued amid an emerging consensus that data scientists should consider learning both. R has a stronger library of statistics and machine learning techniques and is agiler when working with small data. Python is better suited to developing applications, and the Python open source license is less restrictive for commercial application development.

Not surprisingly, deep learning frameworks were the most dynamic category, with TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive, and MXNet taking leadership away from more mature tools like Caffe and Torch. It’s remarkable that deep learning tools introduced as recently as 2014 now seem long in the tooth.

The R Project

The R user community continued to expand in 2016. It ranked second only to SQL in the 2016 O’Reilly Data Science Salary Survey; first in the KDNuggets poll; and first in the Rexer survey. R ranked fifth in the IEEE Spectrum ranking.

R functionality grew at a rapid pace. In April, Microsoft’s Andrie de Vries reported that there were more than 8,000 packages in CRAN, R’s primary repository for contributed packages. As of mid-December, there are 9,737 packages.  Machine learning packages in CRAN continued to grow in number and functionality.

The R Consortium, a Collaborative Project of the Linux Foundation, made some progress in 2016. IBM and ESRI joined the Consortium, whose membership now also includes Alteryx, Avant, DataCamp, Google, Ketchum Trading, Mango Solutions, Microsoft, Oracle, RStudio, and TIBCO. There are now three working groups and eight funded projects.

Hadley Wickham had a good year. One of the top contributors to the R project, Wickham co-wrote R for Data Science and released tidyverse 1.0.0 in September. In The tidy tools manifesto, Wickham explained the four basic principles to a tidy API.

Max Kuhn, the author of Applied Predictive Modeling and developer of the caret package for machine learning, joined RStudio in November. RStudio previously hired Joseph Rickert away from Microsoft.

AT&T Labs is doing some impressive work with R, including the development of a distributed back-end for out-of-core processing with Hadoop and other data platforms. At the UseR! Conference, Simon Urbanek presented a summary.

It is impossible to enumerate all of the interesting analysis performed in R this year. David Robinson’s analysis of Donald Trump’s tweets resonated; using tidyverse, tidytext, and twitteR, Robinson was able to distinguish between the candidate’s “voice” and that of his staffers on the same account.

On the Revolutions blog, Microsoft’s David Smith surveyed the growing role of women in the R community.

Microsoft and Oracle continued to support enhanced R distributions; we’ll cover these in Part Three of this survey.

Python

Among data scientists surveyed in the 2016 KDNuggets poll, 46% said they use Python for analytics, data mining, data science or machine learning projects in the past twelve months. That figure was up from 30% in 2015, and second only to R. In the 2016 O’Reilly Data Science Salary Survey, Python ranked third behind SQL and R.

Python Software Foundation (PSF) expanded the number and dollar value of its grants. PSF awarded many small grants to groups around the world that promote Python education and training. Other larger grants went to projects such as the design of the Python in Education site, improvements to the packaging ecosystem (see below), support for the Python 3.6 beta 1 release sprint, and support for major Python conferences.

The Python Packaging Authority launched the Warehouse project to replace the existing Python Packaging Index (PyPI.) Goals of the project include updating the visual identity, making packages more discoverable and improving support for package users and maintainers.

PSF released Python 3.6.0 and Python 2.7.13 in December.  The scikit-learn team released Version 0.18 with many enhancements and bug fixes; maintenance release Version 0.18.1 followed soon after that.

Many of the key developments for machine learning in Python were in the form of Python APIs to external packages, such as Spark, TensorFlow, H2O, and Theano. We cover these separately below.

Continuum Analytics expanded its commercial support for Python during the year and added commercially licensed software extensions which we will cover in Part Three.

Apache Software Foundation

There are ten Apache projects with machine learning capabilities. Of these, Spark has the most users, active contributors, commits, and lines of code added. Flink is a close second in active development, although most Flink devotees care more about its event-based streaming than its machine learning capabilities.

Top-Level Projects

There are four top-level Apache projects with machine learning functionality: Spark, Flink, Mahout, and OpenNLP.

Apache Spark

The Spark team delivered Spark 2.0, a major release, and six maintenance releases. Key enhancements to Spark’s machine learning capabilities in this release included additional algorithms in the DataFrames-based API, in PySpark and in SparkR, as well as support for saving and loading ML models and pipelines. The DataFrames-based API is now the primary interface for machine learning in Spark, although the team will continue to support the RDD-based API.

GraphX, Spark’s graph engine, remained static. Spark 2.0 included many other enhancements to Spark’s SQL and Streaming capabilities.

Third parties added 24 machine learning packages to Spark Packages in 2016.

The Spark user community continued to expand. Databricks reported 30% growth in Spark Summit attendees and 240% growth in Spark Meetup members. 18% of respondents to Databricks’ annual user survey reported using Spark’s machine learning library in production, up from 13% in 2015. Among data scientists surveyed in the 2016 KDNuggets poll, 22% said they use Spark; in the 2016 O’Reilly Data Science Salary Survey, 21% of the respondents reported using Spark.

The Databricks survey also showed that 61% of users work with Spark in the public cloud, up from 51% in 2015. As of December 2016, there are Spark services available from each of the major public cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google), plus value-added managed services for data scientists from Databricks, Qubole, Altiscale and Domino Data.

Apache Flink

dataArtisans’ Mike Winters reviewed Flink’s accomplishments in 2016 without using the words “machine learning.” That’s because Flink’s ML library is still pretty limited, no doubt because Flink’s streaming runtime is the primary user attraction.

While there are many use cases for scoring data streams with predictive models, there are few real-world use cases for training predictive models on data streams. Machine learning models are useful when they generalize to a population, which is only possible when the process that creates the data is in a steady state. If a process is in a steady state, it makes no difference whether you train on batched data or streaming data; the latest event falls into the same mathematical space as previous events. If recent events produce major changes to the model, the process is not in a steady state, so we can’t rely on the model to predict future events.

Flink does not yet support PMML model import, a relatively straightforward enhancement that would enable users to generate predictions on streaming data with models built elsewhere. Most streaming engines support this capability.

There may be use cases where Flink’s event-based streaming is superior to Spark’s micro-batching. For the most part, though, Flink strikes me as an elegant solution looking for a problem to solve.

Apache Mahout

The Mahout team released four double-dot releases. Key enhancements include the Samsara math environment and support for Flink as a back end. Most of the single machine and MapReduce algorithms are deprecated, so what’s left is a library of matrix operators for Spark, H2O, and Flink.

Apache OpenNLP

OpenNLP is a machine learning toolkit for processing natural language text. It’s not dead; it’s just resting.

Incubator Projects

In 2016, two machine learning projects entered the Apache Incubator, while no projects graduated, leaving six in process at the end of the year: SystemML, PredictionIO, MADLib, SINGA, Hivemall, and SAMOA. SystemML and Hivemall are the best bets to graduate in 2017.

Apache SystemML

SystemML is a library of machine learning algorithms that run on Spark and MapReduce, originally developed by IBM Research beginning in 2010. IBM donated the code to Apache in 2015; since then, IBM has committed resources to developing the project. All of the major contributors are IBM employees, which begs the question: what is the point of open-sourcing software if you don’t attract a community of contributors?

The team delivered three releases in 2016, adding algorithms and other features, including deep learning and GPU support. Given the support from IBM, it seems likely that the project will hit Release 1.0 this year and graduate to top-level status.

Usage remains light among people not employed by IBM. There is no “Powered By SystemML” page, which implies that nobody else uses it. IBM added SystemML to BigInsights this year, which expands the potential reach to IBM-loyal enterprises if there are any of those left. It’s possible that IBM uses the software in some of its other products.

Apache PredictionIO

PredictionIO is a machine learning server built on top of an open source stack, including Spark, HBase, Spray, and Elasticsearch. An eponymous startup began work on the project in 2013; Salesforce acquired the company earlier this year and donated the assets to Apache. Apache PredictionIO entered the Apache Incubator in May.

Apache PredictionIO includes many templates for “prebuilt” applications that use machine learning. These include an assortment of recommenders, lead scoring, churn prediction, electric load forecasting, sentiment analysis, and many others.

Since entering the Incubator, the team has delivered several minor releases. Development activity is light, however, which suggests that Salesforce isn’t doing much with this.

Apache SINGA

SINGA is a distributed deep learning project originally developed at the National University of Singapore and donated to Apache in 2015. The platform currently supports feed-forward models, convolutional neural networks, restricted Boltzmann machines, and recurrent neural networks.  It includes a stochastic gradient descent algorithm for model training.

The team has delivered three versions in 2016, culminating with Release 1.0.0 in September. The release number suggests that the team thinks the project will soon graduate to top-level status; they’d better catch up with paperwork, however, since they haven’t filed status reports with Apache in eighteen months.

Apache MADLib

MADLib is a library of machine learning functions that run in PostgreSQL, Greenplum Database and Apache HAWQ (incubating). Work began in 2010 as a collaboration between researchers at UC-Berkeley and data scientists at EMC Greenplum (now Pivotal Software). Pivotal donated the software assets to the Apache Software Foundation in 2015, and the project entered Apache incubator status.

In 2016, the team delivered three minor releases. The active contributor base is tiny, averaging three contributors per month.

According to a survey conducted by the team, most users have deployed the software on Greenplum database. Since Greenplum currently ranks 35th in the DB-Engines popularity ranking and is sinking fast, this project doesn’t have anywhere to go unless the team can port it to a broader set of platforms.

Apache Hivemall

Originally developed by Treasure Data and donated to the Apache Software Foundation, Hivemall is a scalable machine learning library implemented as a collection of Hive UDFs designed to run on Hive, Pig or Spark SQL with MapReduce, Tez or Spark. The team organized in September 2016 and plans an initial release in Q1 2017.

Given the relatively mature state of the code, large installed base for Hive, and high representation of Spark committers on the PMC, Hivemall is a good bet for top-level status in 2017.

Apache SAMOA

SAMOA entered the Apache Incubator two years ago and died. It’s a set of distributed streaming machine learning algorithms that run on top of S4, Storm, and Samza.

As noted above, under Flink, there isn’t much demand for streaming machine learning. S4 is moribund, Storm is old news and Samza is going nowhere; so, you can think of SAMOA as like an Estate Wagon built on an Edsel chassis. Unless the project team wants to port the code to Spark or Flink, this project is toast.

Machine Learning Projects

This category includes general-purpose machine learning platforms that support an assortment of algorithms for classification, regression, clustering and association. Based on reported usage and development activity, we cover H2O, XGBoost, and Weka in this category.

Three additional projects are worth noting, as they offer graphical user interfaces and appeal to business users. KNIME and RapidMiner provide open-source editions of their software together with commercially licensed versions; we cover these in Part Three of this survey. Orange is a project of the Bioinformatics Laboratory, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Vowpal Wabbit gets an honorable mention. Known to Kaggleists as a fast and efficient learner, VW’s user base is currently too small to warrant full coverage. The project is now domiciled at Microsoft Research. It will be interesting to see if MSFT does anything with it.

H2O

H2O is an open source machine learning project of H2O.ai, a commercial venture. (We’ll cover H2O.ai’s business accomplishments in Part Three of this report.)

In 2016, the H2O team updated Sparkling Water for compatibility with Spark 2.0. Sparkling Water enables data scientists to combine Spark’s data ingestion and ETL capabilities with H2O machine learning algorithms. The team also delivered the first release of Steam, a component that supports model management and deployment at scale, and a preview of Deep Water for deep learning.

For 2017, H2O.ai plans to add an automated machine learning capability and deliver a production release of Deep Water, with support for TensorFlow, MXNet and Caffe back ends.

According to H2O.ai, H2O more than doubled its user base in 2016.

XGBoost

A project of the University of Washington’s Distributed Machine Learning Common (DMLC), XGBoost is an optimized distributed gradient boosting library used by top data scientists, who appreciate its scalability and accuracy. Tianqi Chen and Carlos Guestrin published a paper earlier this year describing the algorithm. Machine learning startups DataRobot and Dataiku added XGBoost to their platforms in 2016.

Weka

Weka is a collection of machine learning algorithms written in Java, developed at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and distributed under GPU license. Pentaho and RapidMiner include the software in their commercial products.

We include Weka in this review because it is still used by a significant minority of data scientists; 11% of those surveyed in the annual KDnuggets poll said they use the software. However, reported usage is declining rapidly, and development has virtually flatlined in the past few years, which suggests that this project may go the way of the eponymous flightless bird.

Deep Learning Frameworks

We include in this category software whose primary purpose is deep learning. Many general-purpose machine learning packages also support deep learning, but the packages listed here are purpose-built for the task.

Since they were introduced in late 2015, Google’s TensorFlow and Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit have rocketed from nothing to leadership in the category. With backing from Amazon and others, MXNet is coming on strong, while Theano and Keras have active communities in the Python world. Meanwhile, older and more mature frameworks, such as Caffe, DL4J, and Torch, are getting buried by the new kids on the block.

Money talks; commercial support matters. It’s a safe bet that projects backed by Google, Microsoft and Amazon will pull away from the pack in 2017.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is the leading deep learning framework, measured by reported usage or by development activity. Launched in 2015, Google’s deep learning platform went from zero to leadership in record time.

In April, Google released TensorFlow 0.8, with support for distributed processing. The development team shipped four additional releases during the year, with many additional enhancements, including:

  • Python 3.5 support
  • iOS support
  • Microsoft Windows support (selected functions)
  • CUDA 8 support
  • HDFS support
  • k-Means clustering
  • WALS matrix factorization
  • Iterative solvers for linear equations, linear least squares, eigenvalues and singular values

Also in April, DeepMind, Google’s AI research group, announced plans to switch from Torch to TensorFlow.

Google released its image captioning model in TensorFlow in September. The Google Brain team reported that this model correctly identified 94% of the images in the ImageNet 2012 benchmark.

In December, Constellation Research selected TensorFlow as 2016’s best innovation in enterprise software, citing its extensive use in projects throughout Google and strong developer community.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit

In 2016, Microsoft rebranded its deep learning framework as Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (MCT) and released Version 2.0 to beta, with a new Python API and many other enhancements. In VentureBeat, Jordan Novet reports.

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in early December, Cray announced that it successfully ran MCT on a Cray XC50 supercomputer with more than 1,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators.

Separately, Microsoft and NVIDIA announced a collaborative effort to support MCT on Tesla GPUs in Azure or on-premises, and on the NVIDIA DGX-1 supercomputer with Pascal GPUs.

Theano

Theano, a project of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms at the University of Montreal, is a Python library for computationally intensive scientific investigation. It allows users to efficiently define, optimize and evaluate mathematical expressions with multi-dimensional arrays. (Reference here.) Like CNTK and TensorFlow, Theano represents neural networks as a symbolic graph.

The team released Theano 0.8 in March, with support for multiple GPUs. Two additional double-dot releases during the year added support for CuDNN v.5 and fixed bugs.

MXNet

MXNet, a scalable deep learning library, is another project of the University of Washington’s Distributed Machine Learning Common (DMLC). It runs on CPUs, GPUs, clusters, desktops and mobile phones, and supports APIs for Python, R, Scala, Julia, Matlab, and Javascript.

The big news for MXNet in 2016 was its selection by Amazon Web Services. Craig Matsumoto reports; Serdar Yegulalp explains; Eric David dives deeper; Martin Heller reviews.

Keras

Keras is a high-level neural networks library that runs on TensorFlow or Theano. Originally authored by Google’s Francois Chollet, Keras had more than 200 active contributors in 2016.

In the Huffington Post, Chollet explains how Keras differs from other DL frameworks. Short version: Keras abstracts deep learning architecture from the computational back end, which made it easy to port from Theano to TensorFlow.

DL4J

Updated, based on comments from Skymind CEO Chris Nicholson.

Deeplearning4j (DL4J) is a project of Skymind, a commercial venture. IT is an open-source, distributed deep-learning library written for Java and Scala. Integrated with Hadoop and Spark, DL4J runs on distributed GPUs and CPUs. Skymind benchmarks well against Caffe, TensorFlow, and Torch.

While Amazon, Google, and Microsoft promote deep learning on their cloud platforms, Skymind seeks to deliver deep learning on standard enterprise architecture, for organizations that want to train models on premises. I’m skeptical that’s a winning strategy, but it’s a credible strategy. Skymind landed a generous seed round in September, which should keep the lights on long enough to find out. Intel will like a deep learning framework that runs on Xeon boxes, so there’s a possible exit.

Skymind proposes to use Keras for a Python API, which will make the project more accessible to data scientists.

Caffe

Caffe, a project of the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) is a deep learning framework released under an open source BSD license.  Stemming from BVLC’s work in vision and image recognition, Caffe’s core strength is its ability to model a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Caffe is written in C++.  Users interact with Caffe through a Python API or through a command line interface.  Deep learning models trained in Caffe can be compiled for operation on most devices, including Windows.

I don’t see any significant news for Caffe in 2016.

Looking Ahead: Big Analytics in 2016

Every year around this time I review last year’s forecast and publish some thoughts about the coming year.

2015 Assessment

First, a brief review of my predictions for 2015:

(1) Apache Spark usage will explode.

Nailed it.

(2) Analytics in the cloud will take off.

In 2015, all of the leading cloud platforms — AWS, Azure, IBM and Google — released new tools for advanced analytics and machine learning.  New cloud-based providers specializing in advanced analytics, such as Qubole and Domino Data, emerged.

Cloud platform providers do not break out revenue by workload, so it’s difficult to measure analytics activity in the cloud; anecdotally, though, there are a growing number of analysts, vendors and service providers whose sole platform is the cloud.

(3) Python will continue to gain on R as the preferred open source analytics platform.

While Python continues to add functionality and gain users, so does R, so it’s hard to say that one is gaining on the other.

(4) H2O will continue to win respect and customers in the Big Analytics market.

In 2015, H2O doubled its user base, expanded its paid subscriber base fourfold and landed a $20 million “B” round.  Not bad for a company that operates on a true open source business model.

(5) SAS customers will continue to seek alternatives.

Among analytic service providers (ASPs) the exit from SAS is a stampede.

With a half dozen dot releases, SAS’ distributed in-memory products are stable enough that they are no longer the butt of jokes.  Customer adoption remains thin; customers are loyal to SAS’ legacy software, but skeptical about the new stuff.

2016 Themes

Looking ahead, here is what I see:

(1) Spark continues its long march into the enterprise.

With Cloudera 6, Spark will be the default processing option for Cloudera workloads.  This does not mean, as some suggest, that MapReduce is dead; it does mean that a larger share of new workloads will run on Spark.  Many existing jobs will continue to run in MapReduce, which works reasonably well for embarrassingly parallel workloads.

Hortonworks and MapR haven’t followed Cloudera with similar announcements yet, but will do so in 2016.  Hortonworks will continue to fiddle around with Hive on Tez, but will eventually give up and embrace Hive on Spark.

SAS will hold its nose and support Spark in 2016.  Spark competes with SAS’ proprietary back end, but it will be forced to support Spark due to its partnerships with the Hadoop distributors.  Analytic applications like Datameer and Microsoft/Revolution Analytics ScaleR that integrate with Hadoop through MapReduce will rebuild their software to interface with Spark.

Spark Core and Spark SQL will remain the most widely used Spark components, with general applicability across many use cases.  Spark MLLib suffers from comparison with alternatives like H2O and XGBoost; performance and accuracy need to improve.  Spark Streaming faces competition from Storm and Flink; while the benefits of “pure” streaming versus micro-batching are largely theoretical, it’s a serious difference that shows up in benchmarks like this.

With no enhancements in 2015, Spark GraphX is effectively dead.  The project leadership team must either find someone interested in contributing, fold the library into MLLib, or kill it.

(2) Open source continues to eat the analytics software world.

If all you read is Gartner and Forrester, you may be inclined to think that open source is just a blip in the market.  Gartner and Forrester ignore open source analytics for two reasons: (1) they get paid by commercial vendors, and (2) users don’t need “analysts” to tell them how to evaluate open source software.  You just download it and check it out.

Surveys of actual users paint a different picture.  Among new grads entering the analytics workforce, using open source is as natural as using mobile phones and Yik Yak; big SAS shops have to pay to send the kids to training.  The best and brightest analysts use open source tools, as shown by the 2015 O’Reilly Data Science Salary Survey;  while SAS users are among the lowest paid analysts, they take consolation from knowing that SPSS users get paid even less.

IBM’s decision in 2015 to get behind Spark exemplifies the movement towards open source.  IBM ranks #2 behind SAS in advanced analytics software revenue, but chose to disrupt itself by endorsing Spark and open-sourcing SystemML.  IBM figures to gain more in cloud and services revenue than it loses in cannibalized software sales.  It remains to be seen how well that will work, but IBM knows how to spot a trend when it sees it.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics in 2015 gives R the stamp of approval from a company that markets the most widely implemented database (SQL Server) and the most widely used BI tool (Excel).  As Microsoft rolls out its R server and SQL-embedded R, look for a big jump in enterprise adoption.  It’s no longer possible for folks to dismiss R as some quirky tool used by academics and hobos.

The open source business model is also attracting capital.  Two analytics vendors with open source models (H2O and RapidMiner) recently landed funding rounds, while commercial vendors Skytree and Alpine languish in the funding doldrums and cut headcount.  Palantir and Opera, the biggest dogs in the analytics startup world, also leverage open source.

Increasingly, the scale-out distributed back end for Big Analytics is an open source platform, where proprietary architecture sticks out like a pimple.  Commercial software vendors can and will thrive when they focus on the end user.  This approach works well for AtScale, Alteryx, RapidMiner and ZoomData, among others.

(3) Cloud emerges as the primary platform for advanced analytics.

By “cloud” I mean all types of cloud: public, private, virtual private and hybrid, as well as data center virtualization tools, such as Apache Mesos.  In other words, self-service elastic provisioning.

High-value advanced analytics is inherently project-oriented and ad-hoc; the most important questions are answered only once.  This makes workloads for advanced analytics inherently volatile.  They are also time-sensitive and may require massive computing resources.

This combination  — immediate need for large-scale computing resources for a finite period — is inherently best served by some form of cloud.  The form of cloud an organization chooses will depend on a number of factors, such as where the source data resides, security concerns and the organization’s skills in virtualization and data center management.  But make no mistake: organizations that do not leverage cloud computing for advanced analytics will fall behind.

Concerns about cloud security for advanced analytics are largely bogus: rent-seeking apologetics from IT personnel who (rightly) view the cloud as a threat to their fiefdom.  Sorry guys — the biggest data breaches in the past two years were from on-premises systems.  Arguably, data is more secure in one of the leading clouds than it is in on premises.

For more on this, read my book later this year. 🙂

(4) Automated machine learning tools become mainstream.

As I’ve written elsewhere, automated machine learning is not a new thing.  Commercial and open source tools that automate modeling in various ways have been available since the 1980s.  Most, however, automated machine learning by simplifying the problem in ways that adversely impact model quality.  In 2016, software will be available to enterprises that delivers expert-level predictive models that win Kaggle competitions.

Since analysts spend 80% of their time data wrangling, automated machine learning tools will not eliminate the hiring crunch in advanced analytics; one should be skeptical of vendor claims that “it’s so easy that even a caveman can do it.”  The primary benefit of automation will be better predictive models built consistently to best practices.  Automation will also expand the potential pool of users from hardcore data scientists to “near-experts”, people with business experience or statistical training who are not skilled in programming languages.

(5) Teradata continues to struggle.

Listening to Teradata’s Q3 earnings call back in November, I thought of this:

100_anniversary_titanic_sinking_by_esai8mellows-d4xbme8

CEO Mike Koehler, wiping pie from his face after another quarterly earnings fail, struggled to explain a coherent growth strategy.  It included (a) consulting services; (b) Teradata software on AWS; (c) Aster on commodity hardware.

Well, that dog won’t hunt.

— Teradata’s product sales drive its consulting revenue.  No product sales, no consulting revenue.   Nobody will ever hire Teradata for platform-neutral enterprise Big Data consulting projects, so without a strategy to build product sales, consulting  revenue won’t grow either.

— Teradata’s principal value added is its ability to converge software and hardware into an integrated appliance.  By itself, Teradata software itself is nothing special; there are plenty of open source alternatives, like Apache Greenplum.  Customers who choose to build a data warehouse on AWS have many options, and Teradata won’t be the first choice.  Meanwhile, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are light years ahead of Teradata delivering true hybrid cloud databases.

— Aster on commodity hardware is a SQL engine with some prebuilt apps.  It runs through MapReduce, which was kind of cool in 2012 but DOA in today’s market: customers who want a SQL engine that runs on commodity hardware have multiple open source options, including Presto, which Teradata also embraces.

Meanwhile, Teradata’s leadership team actually spent time with analysts talking about the R&D tax credit, which seemed like shuffling deck chairs.  The stock is worth about a third of its value in 2012 because the company has repeatedly missed earnings forecasts, and investors have no confidence in current leadership.

At current market value, Teradata is acquisition bait, but it’s not clear who would buy it.  My money’s on private equity, who will cut headcount by half and milk the existing customer base.   There are good people at Teradata; I would advise them all to polish their resumes.

Big Analytics Roundup (November 16, 2015)

Just three main stories this week: possible trouble for a pair of analytic startups; Google releases TensorFlow to open source; and H2O delivers new capabilities at its annual meeting.

In other news, the Spark team announces Release 1.5.2, a maintenance release; and the Mahout guy announces Release 0.11.1, with bug fixes and performance improvements. (h/t Hadoop Weekly)

Two items of note from the Databricks blog:

— Darin McBeath describes Elsevier’s Spark use case and introduces spark-xml-utils, a Spark package contributed by his team.  The package enables the Spark user to filter documents based on an Path expression, return specific nodes for an Path/XQuery expression and transform documents using an XLST stylesheet.

— Rachit Agarwal and Anurag Khandelwal of Berkeley’s AMPLab introduce Succinct, a distributed datastore for queries on compressed data.   They announce release of Succinct Spark, a Spark package that enables search, count, range and random access queries on compressed RDDs.  The authors claim a 75X performance advantage over native Spark using Succinct as a document store,

Three interesting stories on streaming data:

  • In a podcast, Data Artisans CTO Stephan Ewen discusses Flink, Spark and the Kappa architecture.
  • Techalpine’s Kaushik Pal compares Spark and Flink for streaming data.
  • Will McGinnis helps you get started with Python and Flink.

(1) Analytic Startups in Trouble

In The Information, Steve Nellis and Peter Schulz explain why startups return to the funding well frequently — and why those that don’t may be in trouble.  Venture funding isn’t a perfect indicator of success, but is often the only indicator available.  On the list: Skytree Software and Alpine Data Labs.

(2) Google Releases TensorFlow for Machine Learning

On the Google Research blog, Google announces open source availability of TensorFlow.  TensorFlow is Google’s second generation machine learning system; it supports Deep Learning as well as any computation that can be expressed as a flow graph.   Read this white paper for details of the system.  At present, there are Python and C++ APIs;  Google notes that the C++ API may offer some performance advantages.

Video intro here.

In Wired, Cade Metz reports; Erik T. Mueller dismisses; and Metz returns to note that Deep Learning can leverage GPUs, and that AI’s future is in data, as if we didn’t know these things already.

On Slate, Will Oremus feels the buzz.

On his eponymous blog, Sachin Joglekar explains how to do k-means clustering with TensorFlow.

Separately, in VentureBeat, Jordan Novet rounds up open source frameworks for Deep Learning.

(3) H2O.ai Releases Steam

It’s not a metaphor.  At its second annual H2O World event, H2O releases Steam, an open source data science hub that bundles model selection, model management and model scoring into a single container for elastic deployment.

On the H2O Blog, Yotam Levy wraps Day One, Day Two and Day Three of the H2O World event.  Speaker videos are here, slides here.  (Registration required.)  Some notable presentations:

— H2O: Tomas Nykodym on GLM; Mark Landry on GBM and Random Forests; Arno Candel on Deep Learning; Erin LaDell on Ensemble Modeling.

— Michal Malohlava of H2O and Richard Garris of Databricks explain how to run H2O on Databricks Cloud.  Separately, Michal demonstrates Sparkling Water, a Spark package that enables a Spark user to call H2O algorithms; Nidhi Mehta leads a hands-on with PySparkling Water;  and Xavier Tordoir of Data Fellas exhibits Interactive Genomes Clustering with Sparkling Water on the Spark Notebook.

— Szilard Pafka of Epoch summarizes his work to date benchmarking R, Python, Vowpal Wabbit, H2O, xgboost and Spark MLLib.  As reported previously, Pafka’s benchmarks show that H2O and xgboost are the best performers; they are faster and deliver more accurate models.

As reported in last week’s roundup, H2O.ai also announces a $20 million “B” round.

Big Analytics Roundup (November 9, 2015)

My roundup of the Spark Summit Europe is here.

Two important events this week:

  • H2O World starts today and runs through Wednesday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA.   Yotam Levy summarizes here and here.
  • Open Data Science Conference meets November 14-15 at the Marriott Waterfront in SFO

Five backgrounders and explainers:

  • At HUG London, Apache’s Ufuk Celebi delivers a nice intro to Flink.
  • On the Databricks blog, Yesware’s Justin Mills explains how his team migrates Spark applications from concept through prototype through production.
  • On Slideshare, Alpine’s Holden Karau delivers an overview of Spark with Python.
  • Chloe Green wakes from a three year slumber and discovers Spark.
  • On the Cloudera Engineering blog, Madhu Ganta explains how to build a CEP app with Spark and Drools.

Third quarter financials drive the news:

(1) MapR: We Grew 160% in Q3

MapR posts its biggest quarter ever.

(2) HDP: We Grew 168% in Q3

HDP loses $1.33 on every dollar sold, tries to make it up on volume.  Stock craters.

(3) Teradata: We Got A Box of Steak Knives in Q3

Teradata reports more disappointing sales as customers continue to defer investments in big box solutions for data warehousing.  This is getting to be a habit with Teradata; the company missed revenue projections for 2014 as well as the first and second quarters of this year.  Any company can run into headwinds, but a management team that consistently misses targets clearly does not understand its own business and needs to go.

Full report here.

(4) “B” Round for H2O.ai

Machine learning software developer H2O.ai announces a $20 million Series B round led by Paxion Capital Partners.  H2O.ai leads development of H2O, an open source project for distributed in-memory machine learning.  The company reports 25 new support customers this year.

(5) Fuzzy Logix Lands Funds

In-database analytics vendor Fuzzy Logix announces a $5 million “A” round from New Science Ventures.  Fuzzy offers a library of analytic functions that run in a number of high-performance databases and in HiveQL.

(6) New Optimization Package for Spark

On the Databricks blog, Aaron Staple announces availability of Spark TFOCS, an optimization package based on the eponymous Matlab package.  (TFOCS=Templates for First Order Conic Solvers.)

(7) WSO2 Delivers IoT App on Spark 

IoT middleware vendor WSO2 announces Release 3.0 of its open source Data Analytics Server (DAS) platform.   DAS collects data streams and applies batch, real-tim or interactive analytics; predictive analytics are in the roadmap.  For streaming data sources, DAS supports java agents, javascript clients and 100+ connectors.  The software runs on Spark and Lucene.

(8) Hortonworks: We Aren’t Irrelevant

On the Hortonworks blog, Vinay Shukla and Ram Sriharsha tout Hortonworks’ contributions to Spark, including ORC support, an Ambari stack definition for Spark, tighter integration between Hive and Spark, minor enhancements to ML and user-facing documentation.  Looking at the roadmap, they discuss Magellan for geospatial and Zeppelin notebooks. (h/t Hadoop Weekly).

(9) Apache Drill Delivers Fast SQL-on-Laptop

On the MapR blog, Mitsutoshi Kiuchi offers a case study in how to run a silly benchmark.

Comparing the functionality of Drill and Spark SQL, Kiuchi argues that Drill “supports” NoSQL databases but Spark does not, relegating Spark’s packages to a footnote.  “Support” is a loaded word with open source software; technically, nothing is supported unless you pay for it, in which case the scope of support is negotiated as part of the SLA.  It’s also worth noting that MongoDB developed Spark’s interface to MongoDB (for example), which provides a certain amount of confidence.

Kiuchi does not consider other functional areas, such as security, YARN support, query fault tolerance, the user interface, metastore management and view support, where Drill comes up short.

In a previously published performance test of five SQL engines, Spark successfully ran nine out of eleven queries, while Drill ran eight out of ten.  On the eight queries both engines ran, Drill was slightly faster on six.  For this benchmark, Kiuchi runs three queries on his laptop with a tiny dataset.

As a general rule, one should ignore SQL-on-Hadoop benchmarks unless they run industry standard queries (e.g. TPC) with large datasets in a distributed configuration.

IBM Adds Spark Support to Analytics Server

With its customary PR blitz, IBM announces that it has added Spark integration to several products, including SPSS.   IBM gets a small pat on the head for adding Spark support to its Analytics Server software, under the premise that something is better than nothing.

There is a very narrow pool of SPSS users who will benefit from this enhancement.  Spark integration is only available to the subset of SPSS users who license SPSS Modeler; most SPSS users work with SPSS Statistics.  Users must also license SPSS Analytics Server, a product that only runs on Hortonworks HDP or IBM BigInsights.

So, if you’re using the high-end version of the second most popular commercial analytic server, and you’re willing to pay extra to integrate with the third and fourth ranked Hadoop distributions, you’re in luck today.

Analytics Server is a software middle layer installed on Hortonworks or BigInsights; it selectively supports SPSS Modeler operations in Hadoop.  Previous versions ran through MapReduce only;  IBM claims that the latest version runs through Spark when available, although the product documentation is surprisingly quiet on the subject.  There is no reference to Spark in IBM’s Release Notes, Installation Guide or User’s Guide.  Spark is mentioned deep in the Administrator Guide, under Troubleshooting; so the good news is that if the product fails, IBM has some tips — one of which should be “Install Spark.”

Analytics Server 2.1 partially supports most Modeler record and field operations.  Out of Modeler’s 37 data mining nodes, Analytic Server fully supports 8, partially supports 5 and does not support 24.  Among the missing:

  • Logistic Regression
  • k-Means
  • Support Vector Machines
  • PCA
  • Feature Selection
  • Anomaly Detection

Everyone understands that software engineering takes time, but IBM’s priorities are muddled. Logistic regression, k-means, SVM and PCA are all available today in Spark’s open source library; I suspect that IBM figures they can’t justify additional license fees if they point to algorithms that anyone can use for free  (*).  Clustering, PCA, feature selection and anomaly detection are precisely the kind of analyses users want to run on all of the data, not a sample extracted back to a server.

(*) IBM is mistaken on that point, of course.  There are a lot of business users who want the power of Spark but don’t want to mess with a programming API.  These users would happily pay for a nice business user front end like SPSS Modeler, and they won’t care what happens in the back end.

Assuming that this product actually works — not guaranteed, given the sloppy and incomplete documentation — it is better than the previous version of Analytics Server, but that is a low bar.  Spark or no, IBM is way behind SAS in this space; I’m not a great believer in SAS’ proprietary approach to distributed in-memory analytics, but compared to IBM’s offering SAS wins on depth of features and breadth of platform support.  There are no published benchmarks, but I suspect that SAS wins on performance as well.

Also, SAS knows how to write documentation, which seems to be a problem for IBM.

To its credit, IBM’s Analytic Server offers more Spark capability than current offerings by Alpine, Alteryx and RapidMiner; but H2O and Skytree offer richer and better engines for serious machine learning.

As for the majority of SPSS users, wouldn’t it be great if SPSS could just connect to a Spark DataFrame?  Or if Spark could ingest SPSS datasets?

Big Analytics Roundup (March 16, 2015)

Big Analytics news and analysis from around the web.  Featured this week: a new Spark release, Spark Summit East, H2O, FPGA chips, Machine Learning, RapidMiner, SQL on Hadoop and Chemistry Cat.

A reminder to readers that Spark Summit East is coming up March 18-19.

Alteryx

  • On the Alteryx Blog, Michael Snow plugs Alteryx and Qlik for predictive analytics.
  • And again, the same combo for spatial analytics.
  • Adam Riley blogs on testing Alteryx macros.

Apache Spark

For an overview, see the Apache Spark Page.

  • The Spark team announces availability of Spark 1.3.0.  Release notes here.  Highlights of the new release include the DataFrames API, Spark SQL graduates from Alpha, new algorithms in MLLib and Spark Streaming, a direct Kafka API for Spark Streaming, plus additional enhancements and bug fixes.  More on this release separately.
  • On Slideshare, Matei Zaharia outlines the 2015 roadmap for Apache Spark.
  • Also on Slideshare, Reynold Xin and Matei review lessons learned from running large Spark clusters.
  • In advance of Spark Summit, O’Reilly offers discounts on Spark video training and books.
  • Sandy Ryza, co-author of Advanced Analytics With Spark, writes on tuning Spark jobs, on the Cloudera Engineering blog
  • Databricks announces that advertising automation vendor Sharethrough has selected Spark and Databricks Cloud to process Terabyte scale clickstream data.  Case study published here.
  • Holden Karau publishes a Spark testing procedure on Git.
  • On RedMonk, Donnie Berkholz summarizes growing awareness and interest in Spark.

Buzzwords

  • In Wired, Patrick McFadin hits the trifecta with Apache Spark, NoSQL databases and IoT.

H2O

High Performance Computing

  • Datanami reports that a Ryft One FPGA chip (with limited functionality) offers throughput equivalent to 100-200 Spark nodes.  More coverage here.   Ryft’s Christian Shrauder blogs about FGPA.

Machine Learning

  • Ching and Daniel propose using Random Matrix Theory to analyze highly dimensional social media data.
  • Cheng-Tao Chu offers seven ways to mess up your next machine learning project.
  • AMPLab‘s Jiannen Wang blogs on human-in-the-loop machine learning.  Someone should write a book about that.

RapidMiner

SQL on Hadoop

  • On the Pivotal blog, a podcast about Hawq.
  • The Apache Software Foundation announces release 0.10 of Apache Tajo; Silicon Angle reports with a backgrounder.
  • TechWorld reports that AirBNB has open-sourced Airpal, an application that runs on Facebook’s PrestoDB.  According to the story, Airpal is an application that “allows…non-technical employees to work like data scientists”, which suggests that TechWorld thinks data scientists do nothing but SQL.
  • Splice Machine has updated FAQs for its RDBMS-on-Hadoop.

Zementis

Big Analytics Roundup (March 2, 2015)

Here is a roundup of some recent Big Analytics news and analysis.

General

  • SiliconAngle covers the Big Data money trail.

Apache Spark

  • Curt Monash writes about Databricks and Spark on his DBMS2 blog.
  • On the Databricks blog, Dave Wang summarizes Spark highlights from Strata + Hadoop World.
  • In this post, Hammer Lab describes how to monitor Spark with Graphite and Grafana.
  • Cloudera announces Hive on Spark beta.
  • InfoWorld covers Spark’s planned support for R in Release 1.3.
  • Qubole announces Spark as a Service.

 Dato/GraphLab

  • Dato announces new version of GraphLab Create.

 H2O

  • From Strata + Hadoop World, Prithvi Pravu talks about using H2O.
  • Also from Strata, here is Cliff Click’s presentation on H2O, Spark and Python.
  • On the H2O blog, Arno Candel publishes a performance tuning guide for H2O Deep Learning.

 

 

Software for High Performance Advanced Analytics

Strata+Hadoop World week is a good opportunity to update the list of platforms for high-performance advanced analytics.  Vendors are hustling this week to announce their latest enhancements; I’ll post updates as needed.

First some definition.  The scope of this analysis includes software with the following properties:

  • Support for supervised and unsupervised machine learning
  • Support for distributed processing
  • Open platform or multi-vendor platform support
  • Availability of commercial support

There are three main “architectures” for high-performance advanced analytics available today:

  • Integration with an MPP database through table functions
  • Push-down integration with Hadoop
  • Native distributed computing, freestanding or co-located with Hadoop

I’ve written previously about the importance of distributed computing for high-performance predictive analytics, why it’s difficult to deliver and potentially disruptive to the analytics ecosystem.

This analysis excludes software that runs exclusively in a single vendor’s data platform (such as Netezza Analytics, Oracle Advanced Analytics or Teradata Aster‘s built-in analytic functions.)  While each of these vendors seeks to use advanced analytics to differentiate its data warehousing products, most enterprises are unwilling to invest in an analytics architecture that promotes vendor lock-in.  In my opinion, IBM, Oracle and Teradata should consider open sourcing their machine learning libraries, since they’re effectively giving them away anyway.

This analysis also excludes open source libraries “in the wild” (such as Vowpal Wabbit) that lack significant commercial support.

Open Source Software

H2O 

Distributor: H2O.ai (formerly 0xdata)

H20 is an open source distributed in-memory computing platform designed for deployment in Hadoop or free-standing clusters. Current functionality (Release 2.8.4.4) includes Cox Proportional Hazards modeling, Deep Learning, generalized linear models, gradient boosted classification and regression, k-Means clustering, Naive Bayes classifier, principal components analysis, and Random Forests. The software also includes tooling for data transformation, model assessment and scoring.   Users interact with the software through a web interface, a REST API or the h2o package in R.  H2O runs on Spark through the Sparkling Water interface, which includes a new Python API.

H2O.ai provides commercial support for the open source software.  There is a rapidly growing user community for H2O, and H2O.ai cites public reference customers such as Cisco, eBay, Paypal and Nielsen.

MADLib 

Distributor: Pivotal Software

MADLib is an open source machine learning library with a SQL interface that runs in Pivotal Greenplum Database 4.2 or PostgreSQL 9.2+ (as of Release 1.7).  While primarily a captive project of Pivotal Software — most of the top contributors are Pivotal or EMC employees — the support for PostgreSQL qualifies it for this list.    MADLib includes rich analytic functionality, including ten different regression methods, linear systems, matrix factorization, tree-based methods, association rules, clustering, topic modeling, text analysis, time series analysis and dimensionality reduction techniques.

Mahout

Distributor: Apache Software Foundation

Mahout is an eclectic machine learning project incepted in 2011 and currently included in major Hadoop distributions, though it seems to be something of an embarrassment to the community.  The development cadence on Mahout is very slow, as key contributors appear to have abandoned the project three years ago.   Currently (Release 0.9), the project includes twenty algorithms; five of these (including logistic regression and multilayer perceptron) run on a single node only, while the rest run through MapReduce.  To its credit, the Mahout team has cleaned up the software, deprecating unsupported functionality and mandating that all future development will run in Spark.  For Release 1.0, the team has announced plans to deliver several existing algorithms in Spark and H2O, and also to deliver something for Flink (for what that’s worth).  Several commercial vendors, including Predixion Software and RapidMiner leverage Mahout tooling in the back end for their analytic packages, though most are scrambling to rebuild on Spark.

Spark

Distributor: Apache Software Foundation

Spark is currently the platform of choice for open source high-performance advanced analytics.  Spark is a distributed in-memory computing framework with libraries for SQL, machine learning, graph analytics and streaming analytics; currently (Release 1.2) it supports Scala, Python and Java APIs, and the project plans to add an R interface in Release 1.3.  Spark runs either as a free-standing cluster, in AWS EC2, on Apache Mesos or in Hadoop under YARN.

The machine learning library (MLLib) currently (1.2) includes basic statistics, techniques for classification and regression (linear models, Naive Bayes, decision trees, ensembles of trees), alternating least squares for collaborative filtering, k-means clustering, singular value decomposition and principal components analysis for dimension reduction, tools for feature extraction and transformation, plus two optimization primitives for developers.  Thanks to large and growing contributor community, Spark MLLib’s functionality is expanding faster than any other open source or commercial software listed in this article.

For more detail about Spark, see my Apache Spark Page.

Commercial Software

Alpine Chorus

Vendor: Alpine Data Labs

Alpine targets a business user persona with a visual workflow-oriented interface and push-down integration with analytics that run in Hadoop or relational databases.  Although Alpine claims support for all major Hadoop distributions and several MPP databases, in practice most customers seem to use Alpine with Pivotal Greenplum database.  (Alpine and Greenplum have common roots in the EMC ecosystem).   Usability is the product’s key selling point, and the analytic feature set is relatively modest; however, Chorus’ collaboration and data cataloguing capabilities are unique.  Alpine’s customer list is growing; the list does not include a recent win (together with Pivotal) at a large global retailer.

dbLytix

Vendor: Fuzzy Logix

dbLytix is a library of more than eight hundred functions for advanced analytics; analytics run as database table functions and are currently supported in Informix, MySQL, Netezza, ParAccel, SQL Server, Sybase IQ, Teradata Aster and Teradata Database.  Embedded in SQL, analytics may be invoked from a range of application, including custom web interfaces, Microsoft Excel, popular BI tools, SAS or SPSS.   The software is highly extensible, and Fuzzy Logix offers a team of well-qualified consultants and developers for custom applications.

For those seeking the absolute cutting edge in advanced analytics, Fuzzy’s Tanay Zx Series offers more than five hundred analytic functions designed to run on GPU chips.  Tanay is available either as a software library or as an analytic appliance.

IBM SPSS Analytic Server

Vendor: IBM

Analytic Server serves as a Hadoop back end for IBM SPSS Modeler, a mature analytic workbench targeted to business users (licensed separately).  The product, which runs on Apache Hadoop, Cloudera CDH, Hortonworks HDP and IBM BigInsights, enables push-down MapReduce for a limited number of Modeler nodes.  Analytic Server supports most SPSS Modeler data preparation nodes, scoring for twenty-four different modeling methods, and model-building operations for linear models, neural networks and decision trees.  The cadence of enhancements for this product is very slow; first released in May 2013, IBM has released a single maintenance release since then.

RapidMiner Radoop

Vendor: RapidMiner

(Updated for Release 2.2)

RapidMiner targets a business user persona with a “code-free” user interface and deep selection of analytic features.  Last June, the company acquired Radoop, a three-year-old business partner based in Budapest.  Radoop brings to RapidMiner the ability to push down analytic processing into Hadoop using a mix of MapReduce, Mahout, Hive, Pig and Spark operations.

RapidMiner Radoop 2.2 supports more than fifty operators for data transformation, plus the ability to implement custom HiveQL and Pig scripts.  For machine learning, RapidMiner supports k-means, fuzzy k-means and canopy clustering, PCA, correlation and covariance matrices, Naive Bayes classifier and two Spark MLLib algorithms (logistic regression and decision trees); Radoop also supports Hadoop scoring capabilities for any model created in RapidMiner.

Support for Hadoop distributions is excellent, including Cloudera CDH, Hortonworks HDP, Apache Hadoop, MapR, Amazon EMR and Datastax Enterprise.  As of Release 2.2, Radoop supports Kerberos authentication.

Revolution R Enterprise

Vendor: Revolution Analytics

Revolution R Enterprise bundles a number of components, including Revolution R, an enhanced and commercially supported R distribution, a Windows IDE, integration tools and ScaleR, a suite of distributed algorithms for predictive analytics with an R interface.  A little over a year ago, Revolution released its version 7.0, which enables ScaleR to integrate with Hadoop using push-down MapReduce.   The mix of techniques currently supported in Hadoop includes tools for data transformation, descriptive statistics, linear and logistic regression, generalized linear models, decision trees, ensemble models and k-means clustering.   Revolution Analytics supports ScaleR in Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR; Teradata Database; and in free-standing clusters running on IBM Platform LSF or Windows Server HPC.  Microsoft recently announced that it will acquire Revolution Analytics; this will provide the company with additional resources to develop and enhance the platform.

SAS High Performance Analytics

Vendor: SAS

SAS High Performance Analytics (HPA) is a distributed in-memory analytics engine that runs in Teradata, Greenplum or Oracle appliances, on commodity hardware or co-located in Hadoop (Apache, Cloudera or Hortonworks).  In Hadoop, HPA can be deployed either in a symmetric configuration (SAS instance on each DataNode) or in an asymmetric configuration (SAS deployed on dedicated “Analysis” nodes within the Hadoop cluster.)  While an asymmetric architecture seems less than ideal (due to the need for data movement and shuffling), it reduces the need to upgrade the hardware on every node and reduces SAS software licensing costs.

Functionally, there are five different bundles, for statistics, data mining, text mining, econometrics and optimization; each of these is separately licensed.  End users leverage the algorithms from SAS Enterprise Miner, which is also separately licensed.  Analytic functionality is rich compared to available high-performance alternatives, but existing SAS users will be surprised to see that many techniques available in SAS/STAT are unavailable in HPA.

SAS first introduced HPA in December, 2011 with great fanfare.  To date the product lacks a single public reference customer; this could mean that SAS’ Marketing organization is asleep at the switch, or it could mean that customer success stories with the product are few and far between.  As always with SAS, cost is an issue with prospective customers; other issues cited by customers who have evaluated the product include HPA’s inability to run existing programs developed in Legacy SAS, and concerns about the proprietary architecture. Interestingly, SAS no longer talks up this product in venues like Strata, pointing prospective customers to SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop (see below) instead.

SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop

Vendor: SAS

SAS In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop (IMSH) is an analytics application that runs on SAS’ “other” distributed in-memory architecture (SAS LASR Server).  Why does SAS have two in-memory architectures?  Good luck getting SAS to explain that in a coherent manner.  The best explanation, so far as I can tell, is a “mud-on-the-wall” approach to new product development.

Functionally, IMSH Release 2.5 supports data prep with SAS DS2 (an object-oriented language), descriptive statistics, classification and regression trees (C4.5), forecasting, general and generalized linear models, logistic regression, a Random Forests lookalike, clustering, association rule mining, text mining and a recommendation system.   Users interact with the product through SAS Studio, a web-based IDE introduced in SAS 9.4.

Overall, IMSH is a better value than HPA.  SAS prices this software based on the number of cores in the servers upon which it is deployed; while I can’t disclose the list price per core, it’s fair to say that any configuration beyond a sandbox will rapidly approach seven figures for the first year fee.

Skytree

Product: Skytree Infinity

Skytree began life as an academic machine learning project (FastLab, at Georgia Tech); the developers shopped the distributed machine learning core to a number of vendors and, finding no buyers, launched as a commercial software vendor in January 2013.  Recently rebranded from Skytree Server to Skytree Infinity, the product now includes modules for data marshaling and preparation that run on Spark.  Distributed algorithms can run as a free-standing cluster or co-located in Hadoop under YARN.  The product has a programming interface; the vendor claims ability to run from R, Weka, C++ and Python.   Neither Skytree’s modest list of algorithms nor its short list of public reference customers has changed in the past two years.

2015: Predictions for Big Analytics

First, a review of last year’s predictions:

(1) Apache Spark matures as the preferred platform for advanced analytics in Hadoop.

At the New York Strata/Hadoop World conference in October, if you took a drink each time a speaker said “Spark”, you would struggle to make it past noon.  At my lunch table, every single person said his company is currently evaluating Spark.  There are few alternatives to Spark for advanced analytics in Hadoop, and the platform has arrived.

(2) “Co-location” will be the latest buzzword.

Few people use the word “co-location”, but thanks to YARN, vendors like SAS and Skytree are now able to honestly position their products as running “inside” Hadoop.  YARN has changed the landscape for analytics in Hadoop, so that products that interface through MapReduce are obsolete.

(3) Graph engines will be hot.

Graph engines did not take off in 2014.  Development on Apache Giraph has flatlined, and open source GraphLab is quiet as well. Apache Spark’s GraphX is the only graph engine for Hadoop under active development; the Spark team recently promoted GraphX from Alpha to production.  However, with just 10 out of 132 contributors working on GraphX in Release 1.2, the graph engine is relatively quiet compared to the SQL, Machine Learning and Streaming modules.

(4) R approaches parity with SAS in the commercial job market.

As of early 2014, when Bob Muenchin last updated his job market statistics, SAS led R in job postings, but R was closing the gap rapidly.

Linda Burtch of Burtch Works is the nation’s leading executive recruiter for quants and data scientists.  I asked Linda what analytic languages hiring managers seek when they hire quants.  “My clients are still more frequently asking for SAS, although many more are now asking for either SAS or R,” she says.   “I also recommend to my clients who ask specifically for SAS skills to be open to those using R, and many will agree after the suggestion. ”

 (5) SAP emerges as the company most likely to buy SAS.

After much hype about the partnership in late 2013, SAS and SAP issued not a single press release in 2014.  The dollar’s strength against the Euro makes it less likely that SAP will buy SAS.

(6) Competition heats up for “easy to use” predictive analytics.

Software companies target the “easy to use” analytics market because it’s larger than the expert market and because expert analysts rarely switch.  Alpine, Alteryx, and Rapid Miner all gained market presence in 2014; Dell’s acquisition of Statsoft gives that company the deep pockets they need for a makeover.  In easy to use cloud analytics, StatWing has added functionality, and IBM Watson Analytics emerged from beta.

Four out of six ain’t bad.  Now looking ahead:

(1) Apache Spark usage will explode.

While interest in Spark took off in 2014, relatively few people actually use the platform, which appeals primarily to hard-core data scientists.  That will change in 2015, for several reasons:

  • The R interface planned for release in Q1 opens the platform to a large and engaged community of users
  • Alteryx, Alpine and other easy to use analytics tools currently support or plan to support Spark RDDs as a data source
  • Databricks Cloud offers an easy way to spin up a Spark cluster

As a result of these and other innovations, there will be many more Spark users in twelve months than there are today.

(2) Analytics in the cloud will take off.

Yes, I know — some companies are reluctant to put their “sensitive” data in the cloud.  And yet, all of the top ten data breaches in 2014 defeated an on-premises security system.  Organizations are waking up to the fact that management practices are the critical factor in data security — not the physical location of the data.

Cloud is eating the analytics world for three big reasons:

  • Analytic workloads tend to be lumpy and difficult to predict
  • Analytic projects often need to get up and running quickly
  • Analytic service providers operate in a variable cost world, with limited capital for infrastructure

Analytic software options available in the Amazon Marketplace are increasing rapidly; current options include Revolution R, BigML and YHat, among others.  For the business user, StatWing and IBM Watson Analytics provide compelling independent cloud-based platforms.

Even SAS seeks to jump on the Cloud bandwagon, touting its support for Amazon Web Services.  Cloud devotees may be disappointed, however, to discover that SAS does not offer elastic pricing for AWS,  lacks a native access engine for RedShift, and does not support its Hadoop interface with EMR.

(3) Python will continue to gain on R as the preferred open source analytics platform.

The Python versus R debate is at least as contentious as the SAS versus R debate, and equally tiresome.  As a general-purpose scripting language, Python’s total user base is likely larger than R’s user base.  For analytics, however, the evidence suggests that R still leads Python, but that Python is catching up.  According to a recent poll by KDNuggets, more people switch from R to Python than the other way ’round.

Both languages have their virtues. The sheer volume of analytic features in R is much greater than Python, though in certain areas of data science (such as Deep Learning) Python appears to have the edge.  Devotees of each language claim that it is easier to use than the other, but the two languages are at rough parity by objective measures.

Python has two key advantages over R.  As a general-purpose language, it is a better tool for application development; hence, for embedded analytic applications (such as recommendation engines, decision engines and online scoring), Python gets the nod over R.  Second, Python’s open source license is less restrictive than the R license, which makes it a better choice for commercial use.  There are provisions in the R license that scare the pants off some company lawyers, rightly or wrongly.

(4) H2O will continue to win respect and customers in the Big Analytics market.

If you’re interested in scalable analytics but haven’t checked out H2O, you should.  H2O is a rapidly growing true open source project for distributed analytics; it runs in clusters, in Hadoop and in Amazon Cloud; offers an excellent R interface together with Java and Scala APIs; and is accessible from Tableau.  H2O supports a rich and growing machine learning library that includes Deep Learning and the only available distributed Gradient Boosting algorithm on the market today.

While the software is freely available, H2O offers support and services for an attractive price.  The company currently claims more than two thousand users, including reference customers Cisco, eBay, Nielsen and Paypal.

(5) SAS customers will continue to seek alternatives.

SAS once had an almost religious loyalty from its customers.  This is no longer the case; in a recent report published by Gartner, surveyed executives reported they are more likely to discontinue use of SAS than any other business intelligence software.  While respondents rated SAS above average on sales experience and average on product quality, SAS fared poorly in measures of usability and ease of integration.  While the Gartner survey does not address pricing, it’s fair to say that no vendor can command premium prices without an outstanding product.

While few enterprises plan to pull the plug on SAS entirely, many are limiting growth of the SAS footprint and actively developing alternatives.  This is especially marked in the analytic services industry, which tends to attract people with the skills to use Python or R, and where cost control is important.  Even among big banks and pharma companies, though, SAS user headcount is declining.