Tag: Spark Streaming

Big Analytics Roundup (February 29, 2016)

Happy Leap Day.  Tachyon’s rebranding as Alluxio, release of CaffeOnSpark and GA for Google Cloud Dataproc lead the hard news this week.  The Alluxio announcement has inspired big thinkers to share big thoughts.  And, we have a nice crop of explainers.  Scroll down to the bottom for another SQL on Hadoop benchmark.

Explainers

— In SearchDataManagement, Jack Vaughn explains Spark 2.0.

— In Datanami, Alex Woodie explains Structured Streaming in Spark 2.0.

— MapR’s Jim Scott explains Spark accumulators.   Jim also explains Spark Streaming.

— DataArtisans’ Fabian Hueske introduces Flink.

— In SlideShare, Julian Hyde explains streaming SQL.

— Wes McKinney explains why pandas users should be excited about Apache Arrow.

— On her blog, Paige Roberts explains Project Tungsten, complete with pictures.

— Someone from Dremio explains Drillix, which is what you get when you combine Apache Phoenix and Apache Drill. (h/t Hadoop Weekly).

Perspectives

— In TheNextPlatform, Timothy Prickett Morgan argues that Tachyon Caching (Alluxio) is bigger than Spark

— In SiliconAngle, Maria Deutscher opines that Alluxio (née Tachyon) could replace HDFS for Spark users.

— In The New Stack, Susan Hall speculates that Apache Arrow’s columnar data layer could accelerate Spark and Hadoop.  She means Hadoop in a general way, e.g. the Hadoop ecosystem.

— On the Dataiku blog, “Caroline” interviews John Kelly, Managing Director of Berkeley Research Group and asks him questions about data science.  Left unanswered: is it “Data-ikoo” or “Day-tie-koo?”

— Alpine Data Labs’ Steven Hillion ruminates on success.  He’d be better off ruminating on “how to raise your next round of venture capital.”

— Max Slater-Robins opines that Microsoft is inventing the future, which is even better than winning the internet.

— In ZDNet, Andrew Brust wonders if Databricks is vying for a full analytics stack, citing the new Dashboard feature as cause for wonder.  He’s just trolling.

— In Search Cloud Applications, Joel Shore opines that streaming analytics is replacing complex event processing, which makes sense.   He further opines that Flink will displace Spark for streaming, which doesn’t make sense.   Shore interviews IBM’s Nagui Halim about streaming here.

Open Source Announcements

— Alluxio (née Tachyon) announces Release 1.0.0.  Alluxio is open source software distributed through Git under an Apache license, but is not an Apache project.  Yet.  Release 1.0 includes frameworks for MapReduce, Spark, Flink and Zeppelin.  Daniel Gutierrez reports.

— Yahoo releases CaffeOnSpark, a distributed deep learning package.  Caffe is one of the better-known deep learning packages, with a track record in image recognition.  Software is available on Git.  For more information, see the Wiki.  Alex Handy reports; Charlie Osborne reports.

— RapidMiner China announces availability of an extension for deep learning engine DL4J.  The extension is open source, and works with the open source version of RapidMiner.  DL4J sponsor Skymind collaborated.

Commercial Announcements

–Tachyon Nexus, the commercial venture founded to support Tachyon, the memory-centric virtual distributed storage system, announces that it has rebranded as Alluxio.

— Google announces general availability for its Cloud Dataproc managed service for Spark and Hadoop.

Funding Announcements

Health analytics vendor Health Catalyst lands a $70M Series E round.

AtScale Benchmarks SQL-on-Hadoop Engines

On the AtScale blog, Trystan Leftwich summarizes results from a benchmark test of Hive on Tez (1.2/0.7), Cloudera Apache Impala (2.3) and Spark SQL (1.6).  The AtScale team tested Impala and Spark with Parquet and Hive on Tez with ORC.  For test cases, the team used TPC-H data arranged in a star schema, and ran 13 queries in each SQL engine multiple times, averaging the results.

While Hortonworks recommends ORC with Hive/Tez, there are published cases where users achieved good results with Hive/Tez on Parquet.  Since the storage format has a big impact on SQL performance, I would have tested Hive/Tez on Parquet as well.  AtScale did not respond to queries on this point.

Key findings:

  • All three engines performed about the same on single-table queries, and on queries joining three small tables.
  • Spark and Impala ran faster than Hive on queries joining three large tables.
  • Spark ran faster than Impala on queries joining four or more tables.

The team ran the same tests with AtScale’s commercial caching technology, with significant performance improvements for all three engines.

In concurrency testing, Impala performed much better than Hive or Spark.

Details of the test available in a white paper here (registration required).

Spark Summit Europe Roundup

The 2015 Spark Summit Europe met in Amsterdam October 27-29.  Here is a roundup of the presentations, organized by subject areas.   I’ve omitted a few less interesting presentations, including some advertorials from sponsors.

State of Spark

— In his keynoter, Matei Zaharia recaps findings from Databricks’ Spark user survey, notes growth in summit attendance, meetup membership and contributor headcount.  (Video here). Enhancements expected for Spark 1.6:

  • Dataset API
  • DataFrame integration for GraphX, Streaming
  • Project Tungsten: faster in-memory caching, SSD storage, improved code generation
  • Additional data sources for Streaming

— Databricks co-founder Reynold Xin recaps the last twelve months of Spark development.  New user-facing developments in the past twelve months include:

  • DataFrames
  • Data source API
  • R binding and machine learning pipelines

Back-end developments include:

  • Project Tungsten
  • Sort-based shuffle
  • Netty-based network

Of these, Xin covers DataFrames and Project Tungsten in some detail.  Looking ahead, Xin discusses the Dataset API, Streaming DataFrames and additional Project Tungsten work.  Video here.

Getting Into Production

— Databricks engineer and Spark committer Aaron Davidson summarizes common issues in production and offers tips to avoid them.  Key issues: moving beyond Python performance; using Spark with R; network and CPU-bound workloads.  Video here.

— Tuplejump’s Evan Chan summarizes Spark deployment options and explains how to productionize Spark, with special attention to the Spark Job Server.  Video here.

— Spark committer and Databricks engineer Andrew Or explains how to use the Spark UI to visualize and debug performance issues.  Video here.

— Kostas Sakellis and Marcelo Vanzin of Cloudera provide a comprehensive overview of Spark security, covering encryption, authentication, delegation and authorization.  They tout Sentry, Cloudera’s preferred security platform.  Video here.

Spark for the Enterprise

— Revisting Matthew Glickman’s presentation at Spark Summit East earlier this year, Vinny Saulys reviews Spark’s impact at Goldman Sachs, noting the attractiveness of Spark’s APIs, in-memory processing and broad functionality.  He recaps Spark’s viral adoption within GS, and its broad use within the company’s data science toolkit.  His wish list for Spark: continued development of the DataFrame API; more built-in formulae; and a better IDE for Spark.  Video here.

— Alan Saldich summarizes Cloudera’s two years of experience working with Spark: a host of engineering contributions and 200+ customers (including Equifax, Barclays and a slide full of others).  Video here.  Key insights:

  • Prediction is the most popular use case
  • Hive is most frequently co-installed, followed by HBase, Impala and Solr.
  • Customers want security and performance comparable to leading relational databases combined with simplicity.

Data Sources and File Systems

— Stephan Kessler of SAP and Santiago Mola of Stratio explain Spark integration with SAP HANA Vora through the Data Sources API.  (Video unavailable).

— Tachyon Nexus’ Gene Pang offers an excellent overview of Tachyon’s memory-centric storage architecture and how to use Spark with Tachyon.  Video here.

Spark SQL and DataFrames

— Michael Armbrust, lead developer for Spark SQL, explains DataFrames.  Good intro for those unfamiliar with the feature.  Video here.

— For those who think you can’t do fast SQL without a Teradata box, Gianmario Spacagna showcases the Insight Engine, an application built on Spark.  More detail about the use case and solution here.  The application, which requires many very complex queries, runs 500 times faster on Spark than on Hive, and likely would not run at all on Teradata.  Video here.

— Informatica’s Kiran Lonikar summarizes a proposal to use GPUs to support columnar data frames.  Video here.

— Ema Orhian of Atigeo describes jaws, a restful data warehousing framework built on Spark SQL with Mesos and Tachyon support.  Video here.

Spark Streaming

— Helena Edelson, VP of Product Engineering at Tuplejump, offers a comprehensive overview of streaming analytics with Spark, Kafka, Cassandra and Akka.  Video here.

— Francois Garillot of Typesafe and Gerard Maas of virdata explain and demo Spark Streaming.    Video here.

— Iulian Dragos and Luc Bourlier explain how to leverage Mesos for Spark Streaming applications.  Video here.

Data Science and Machine Learning

— Apache Zeppelin creator and NFLabs co-founder Moon Soo Lee reviews the Data Science lifecycle, then demonstrates how Zeppelin supports development and collaboration through all phases of a project.  Video here.

— Alexander Ulanov, Senior Research Scientist at Hewlett-Packard Labs, describes his work with Deep Learning, building on MLLib’s multilayer perceptron capability.  Video here.

— Databricks’ Hossein Falaki offers an introduction to R’s strengths and weaknesses, then dives into SparkR.  He provides an overview of SparkR architecture and functionality, plus some pointers on mixing languages.  The SparkR roadmap, he notes, includes expanded MLLib functionality; UDF support; and a complete DataFrame API.  Finally, he demos SparkR and explains how to get started.  Video here.

— MLlib committer Joseph Bradley explains how to combine the strengths R, scikit-learn and MLlib.  Noting the strengths of R and scikit-learn libraries, he addresses the key question: how do you leverage software built to support single-machine workloads in a distributed computing environment?   Bradley demonstrates how to do this with Spark, using sentiment analysis as an example.  Video here.

— Natalino Busa of ING offers an introduction to real-time anomaly detection with Spark MLLib, Akka and Cassandra.  He describes different methods for anomaly detection, including distance-based and density-based techniques. Video here.

— Bitly’s Sarah Guido explains topic modeling, using Spark MLLib’s Latent Dirchlet Allocation.  Video here.

— Casey Stella describes using word2vec in MLLib to extract features from medical records for a Kaggle competition.  Video here.

— Piotr Dendek and Mateusz Fedoryszak of the University of Warsaw explain Random Ferns, a bagged form of Naive Bayes, for which they have developed a Spark package. Video here.

GeoSpatial Analytics

— Ram Sriharsha touts Magellan, an open source geospatial library that uses Spark as an engine.  Magellan, a Spark package, supports ESRI format files and GeoJSON; the developers aim to support the full suite of OpenGIS Simple Features for SQL.  Video here.

Use Cases and Applications

— Ion Stoica summarizes Databricks’ experience working with hundreds of companies, distills to two generic Spark use cases:  (1) the “Just-in-Time Data Warehouse”, bypassing IT bottlenecks inherent in conventional DW; (2) the unified compute engine, combining multiple frameworks in a single platform.  Video here.

— Apache committer and SKT engineer Yousun Jeong delivers a presentation documenting SKT’s Big Data architecture and a use case real-time analytics.  SKT needs to perform real-time analysis of the radio access network to improve utilization, as well as timely network quality assurance and fault analysis; the solution is a multi-layered appliance that combines Spark and other components with FPGA and Flash-based hardware acceleration.  Video here.

— Yahoo’s Ayman Farahat describes a collaborative filtering application built on Spark that generates 26 trillion recommendations.  Training time: 52 minutes; prediction time: 8 minutes.  Video here.

— Sujit Pal explains how Elsevier uses Spark together with Solr, OpenNLP to annotate documents at scale.  Elsevier has donated the application, called SoDA, back to open source.  Video here.

— Parkinson’s Disease affects one out of every 100 people over 60, and there is no cure.  Ido Karavany of Intel describes a project to use wearables to track the progression of the illness, using a complex stack including pebble, Android, IOS, play, Phoenix, HBase, Akka, Kafka, HDFS, MySQL and Spark, all running in AWS.   With Spark, the team runs complex computations daily on large data sets, and implements a rules engine to identify changes in patient behavior.  Video here.

— Paula Ta-Shma of IBM introduces a real-time routing use case from the Madrid bus system, then describes a solution that includes kafka, Secor, Swift, Parquet and elasticsearch for data collection; Spark SQL and MLLib for pattern learning; and a complex event processing engine for application in real time.  Video here.

Spark 1.4 Released

On June 11, the Spark team announced availability of Release 1.4.  More than 210 contributors from 70 different organizations contributed more than 1,000 patches.  Spark continues to expand its contributor base, the best measure of health for an open source project.

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 2.00.20 PM

Spark Core

The Spark team continues to improve Spark operability, performance and compatibility.  Key enhancements include:

  • The first phase in Project Tungsten performance improvements, a cache-friendly sort algorithm
  • Also for improved performance, serialized shuffle output
  • For the Spark UI, visualization for Spark DAGs and operational monitoring
  • A REST API for application information, such as job, stage, task and storage status
  • For Python users, support for Python 3.x, plus external spilling for Python groupByKey operations
  • Two YARN enhancements: support for YARN on EC2 and security for long-running YARN applications
  • Two Mesos enhancements: Docker support and cluster mode.

DataFrames and SQL

This release includes extensions of analytic functions for DataFrames, operational utilities for Spark SQL and support for ORCFile format.

A complete list of enhancements to the DataFrame API is here.

R Interface

AMPLab released a developer version of SparkR in January 2014.  In June 2014, Alteryx and Databricks announced a partnership to lead development of this component.  In March, 2015, SparkR officially merged into Spark.

SparkR offers an interface to use Apache Spark from R.  In Spark 1.4, SparkR supports operations like selection, filtering and aggregation on large datasets.  It’s important to note that as of this release SparkR does not support an interface to MLLib, Streaming or GraphX.

Machine Learning

In Spark 1.4, ML pipelines graduate from alpha release, add feature transformations (Vector Assembler, String Indexer, Bucketizer etc.) and a Python API.  Additional enhancements to ML include:

There appears to be an effort under way to rebuild MLLib’s supervised learning algorithms in ML.

Enhancements to MLLib include:

There is a single enhancement to GraphX in Spark 1.4, a personalized PageRank.  Spark’s graph analytics capabilities are comparatively static.

Streaming

The enhancements to Spark Streaming include improvements to the UI plus enhanced support for Kafka and Kinesis and a pluggable interface for write ahead logs.  Enhanced support for Kafka includes better error reporting, support for Kafka 0.8.2.1 and Kafka with Scala 2.11, input rate tracking and a Python API for Kakfa direct mode.

Big Analytics Roundup (April 6, 2015)

Late posting today due to holiday travel.

In the week following Spark Summit East, a number of Spark skeptics surfaced, a sign that people take Spark seriously.

The top item of the week, though, is Tiernan Ray’s interview with Michael Stonebraker in Barrons, a must-read.

Analytic Software

Forrester published its latest “wave” for Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, an inaptly named report that lumps together solutions that can work with Big Data and those that cannot.  I’ll write a more detailed summary later this week.  Quick takes:  Alteryx, Oracle and RapidMiner did well, but Alpine and Microsoft clearly need to shift some of their analyst relations spending from Gartner to Forrester.

Apache Drill

Apache Drill announces Release 0.8.

Apache Spark

Analysis

In opensource.com, Jen Wike Hugar interviews key Spark contributor Reynold Xin.

Mike Vizard, in the aptly named Talkin’ Cloud, describes the high potential for Spark in the cloud.  (Though he does not mention it, more than half of respondents to a recent Typesafe survey of Spark users said they deploy it in the cloud.)

Matei Zaharia, creator of Spark and CTO of Databricks, held an Ask Me Anything last week on Reddit.  Key takeaways: no, Matei is not a musician, and yes, he likes Nutella. 

Spark has clearly reached a point of inflection when skeptical analysis emerges.  Criticism is healthy, of course, but what the skeptics all seem to share is an ignorance of machine learning and streaming applications, and the challenge of making those applications work well in MapReduce.  In other words, they all seem to misunderstand the purpose of Spark, and would do well to learn more about the platform before quibbling on the margins.

  • Professional cat herder Andrew Oliver compares Spark to Tableau and, shockingly, finds it wanting.  Also, Andrew heard people say unflattering things about Hadoop at Spark Summit East.  Who knew that Hadoop devotees are so sensitive?
  • In DataMill, Nicole Leskowski asks if Apache Spark is the next big thing in Big Data Analytics, a question that would have been timely last year.
  • In TechTarget, Jack Vaughan wonders whether Spark is just a shiny new object, while ruminating about Digital Equipment and the PDP-11.  His point will be lost on most readers.
  • Returning to ZDNet from GigaOm, Andrew Brust asks if Spark is overhyped, citing unnamed second-hand sources that tell him Spark is “not ready for prime time.”   Note to Andrew: you can download the software here.

Spark Core

Matei Zaharia celebrates Spark’s fifth birthday with a brief history.

On the Cloudera blog, Sandy Ryza concludes his series on tuning Spark jobs.

Spark Streaming

On the Databricks blog. Cody Koeninger, Davies Liu and Tathagata Das describe the new direct Kakfa API available in Spark 1.3

Databricks

Databricks announced that Timeful, a startup specializing in intelligent time management, has deployed its recommendation engine in Databricks Cloud.  Case study available here.

Hadoop Ecosystem

In Datanami, Hadoop skeptic Alex Woodie asks if Hadoop needs a reality check, observing that the leading Hadoop distributors do not make money, a trait shared by most industries at comparable points of maturity.  Woodie cites Wikibon’s Big Data revenue summary as evidence that there is little money in Hadoop, without considering the validity of Wikibon’s data (which is self-reported by the vendors and lacks consistent definitions).  Even if we accept the Wikibon data at face value, Woodie also fails to note that startup Palantir (which is totally into Hadoop) now reports more Big Data revenue than industry leader SAS.  Another unanswered question: if Hadoop is so inconsequential, why has Teradata lost half its market value since 2012?

IBM

IBM announces BigInsights 4.0 just nine months after releasing BigInsights 3.0.  BigInsights includes the usual Hadoop bits, plus:

  • BigSQL, a federation engine for SQL across relational databases and Hadoop
  • Big Sheets, a Datameer-like spreadsheet-on-Hadoop tool
  • SystemML, a home-grown machine learning library that runs in MapReduce
  • Text analytics capability
  • Big R, an interface that can push embarrassingly parallel R processing into Hadoop

Streaming and Real-Time Processing

On the O’Reilly Radar blog, Ben Lorica describes platforms and applications for processing data streams.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 30, 2015)

Lots of Spark news this week, following last week’s Sparkalanche, plus some other non-Spark news just to show that Big Analytics isn’t entirely about Spark.

Alteryx

  • In IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca interviews Alteryx COO George Mathew, argues that analytics is for people.  Left unanswered: who else it could be for.

Analytic Startups

  • Analytics vendor Ayasdi lands a $55 million “C” round.
  • Localytics, which specializes in analytics for mobile and web apps, secures a $35 million “D” round.

Apache Drill

  • MicroStrategy announces certification of Apache Drill with MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise Platform.

Apache Spark

Analysis

  • IBM Big Data “evangelist” James Kobelius confirms that IBM has no idea what to do with Spark.
  • In TechRepublic, Matt Asay argues that Hadoop won’t disappear just because it’s slow, knocking over several straw men in the process.   On readwrite, he makes similar points; and on InfoWorld, he goes for the hat trick.
  • In InfoWorld, Platfora’s Peter Schlampp offers five reasons why Spark is the next big thing.

Applications

  • On the Cloudera blog, Sam Shuster of Edmunds.com describes a dashboard built with Spark Streaming, SparkOnHbase and Morphlines.
  • In InfoQ, Srini Penchikala of Pinterest explains why he’s using Spark Streaming, Kafka and MemSQL for a real-time application.

Data Science

  • On the Databricks blog, Joseph Bradley writes an excellent article on Topic Modeling with Spark’s new Latent Dirichlet Allocation capability.

Developer

  • On the Databricks blog, Michael Armbrust describes new Spark SQL features in Spark 1.3
  • On Slideshare, Vida Ha and Holden Karau share tips for writing better Spark programs; video here.

Deep Learning

  • Tomasz Malisiewicz of Vision.ai blogs on Deep Learning versus Machine Learning versus Pattern Recognition.

RapidMiner

  • RapidMiner publishes a white paper on code-free analytics in Hadoop, and another on Hadoop security.

Spark Summit East: A Report (Updated)

Updated with links to slides where available.  Some links are broken, conference organizers have been notified.

Spark Summit East 2015 met on March 18 and 19 at the Sheraton Times Square in New York City.  Conference organizers announced another sellout (like the last two Spark Summits on the West Coast).

Competition for speaking slots at Spark events is heating up.  There were 170 submissions for 30 speaking slots at this event, compared to 85 submissions for 50 slots at Spark Summit 2014.  Compared to the last Spark Summit, presentations in the Applications Track, which I attended, were more polished, and demonstrate real progress in putting Spark to work.

The “father” of Spark, Matei Zaharia, kicked off the conference with a review of Spark progress in 2014 and planned enhancements for 2015.  Highlights of 2014 include:

  • Growth in contributors, from 150 to 500
  • Growth in the code base, from 190K lines to 370K lines
  • More than 500 known production instances at the close of 2014

Spark remains the most active project in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Also, in 2014, a team at Databricks smashed the Daytona GreySort record for petabyte-scale sorting.  The previous record, set in 2013, used MapReduce running on 2,100 machines to complete the task in 72 minutes.  The new record, set by Databricks with Spark running in the cloud, used 207 machines to complete the task in 23 minutes.

Key enhancements projected for 2015 include:

  • DataFrames, which are similar to frames in R, already released in Spark 1.3
  • R interface, which currently exists as SparkR, an independent project, targeted to be merged into Spark 1.4 in June
  • Enhancements to machine learning pipelines, which are sequences of tasks linked together into a process
  • Continued expansion of smart interfaces to external data sources, pushing logic into the sources
  • Spark packages — a repository for third-party packages (comparable to CRAN)

Databricks CEO Ion Stoica followed with a pitch for Databricks Cloud, which included brief testimonials from myfitnesspal, Automatic, Zoomdata, Uncharted Software and Tresata.

Additional keynoters included Brian Schimpf of Palantir, Matthew Glickman of Goldman Sachs and Peter Wang of Continuum Analytics.

Spark contributors presented detailed views on the current state of Spark:

  • Michael Armbrust, Spark SQL lead developer presented on the new DataFrames API and other enhancements to Spark SQL.
  • Tathagata Das delivered a talk on the current state and future of Spark Streaming.
  • Joseph Bradley covered MLLib, focusing on the Pipelines capability added in Spark 1.2
  • Ankur Dave offered an overview of GraphX, Spark’s graph engine.

Several observations from the Applications track:

(1) Geospatial applications had a strong presence.

  • Automatic, Tresata and Uncharted all showed live demonstrations of marketable products with geospatial components running on Spark
  • Mansour Raad of ESRI followed his boffo performance at Strata/Hadoop World last October with a virtuoso demonstration of Spark with massive spatial and temporal datasets and the ESRI open source GIS stack

(2) Spark provides a great platform for recommendation engines.

  • Comcast uses Spark to serve personalized recommendations based on analysis of billions of machine-generated events
  • Gilt Groupe uses Spark for a similar real-time application supporting flash sale events, where products are available for a limited time and in limited quantities
  • Leah McGuire of Salesforce described her work building a recommendation system using Spark

(3) Spark is gaining credibility in retail banking.

  • Sandy Ryza of Cloudera presented on Value At Risk (VAR) computations in Spark, a critical element in Basel reporting and stress testing
  • Startup Tresata demonstrated its application for Anti Money Laundering, which is built on a social graph built in Spark

(4) Spark has traction in the life sciences

  • Jeremy Freeman of HHMI Janelia Research Center, a regular presenter at Spark Summits, covered Spark’s unique capability for streaming machine learning.
  • David Tester of Novartis presented plans to build a trillion-edge graph for genomic integration
  • Timothy Danforth of Berkeley’s AMPLab delivered a presentation on next-generation genomics with Spark and ADAM
  • Kevin Mader of ETH Zurich spoke about turning big hairy 3D images into simple, robust, reproducible numbers without resorting to black boxes or magic

Also in the applications track: presenters from Baidu, myfitnesspal and Shopify.

Spark Updates

Here is a quick roundup of some recent Apache Spark news.

(1) Databricks and Typesafe released results from a survey of 2,136 individuals (mostly developers).  Some key findings:

  • 13% of respondents run Spark in production, 20% plan to use Spark in 2015
  • Most say they expect to use the 82% Spark core to replace MapReduce
  • 88% say they use the Scala API
  • Respondents split on deployment: 54% deploy Spark standalone, 42% co-located with Hadoop under YARN
  • 62% load data from HDFS, 46% from unspecified databases, 41% from Apache Kafka, 29% from Amazon S3

Analysis from GigaOm here.  Copy of the report available here (registration required).

(2) On the Databricks blog, Jeremy Freeman introduces streaming k-means, a capability included in Spark 1.2.   Excellent article outlining some of the practical differences between streaming and static analytics.

(3) NewSQL vendor MemSQL announced availability of its Spark Connector, which it claims offers seamless connectivity with Spark.   More coverage here, here and here; analysis here.

(4) Learning Spark, by Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell, and Matei Zaharia is now available from O’Reilly Media.

(5) InfoWorld selected Apache Spark (along with 31 other products and open source projects) for its 2015 Technology of the Year Award.

Spark 1.1 Update

For an overview of Spark, see the Apache Spark Page.

On September 11, the Spark team announced release of Spark 1.1.   This latest version of Spark includes a number of significant enhancements:

  • As announced at the Spark Summit, Shark is now converged with Spark SQL.  Databricks has migrated its Shark workloads to Spark, and reports 2X-5X performance improvement.
  • The team has added a library of basic statistics for exploratory analysis, including correlations and hypothesis testing.  There are also new tools for stratified sampling and random generation.
  • Also new to MLLib: utilities for feature extraction for text mining and feature transformation.  Feature extraction techniques include Word2Vec and TF-IDF;  transformation techniques include normalization and scaling.
  • New MLLib algorithms include non-negative matrix factorization and singular value decomposition (SVD) using the Lanczos algorithm.  The combination of feature extraction capabilities and a robust SVD give Spark a strong foundation for text mining.
  • For Spark Streaming, the team has added support for Amazon Kinesis and a streaming linear regression algorithm.

There are also many bug fixes, as well as performance and usability improvements.  With ~175 contributors for this release, Spark continues to be one of the most active projects in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Since release of Spark 1.0, Databricks has announced certification for three additional Spark distributions:

  • Bluedata, a pioneer in big data private cloud.
  • Guavus, an operational intelligence platform.
  • Stratio, a commercially supported open source “Pure Spark” distribution.

In related news, Databricks and O’Reilly Media recently announced a certification program, which will be launched October 15-17 at Strata NY + Hadoop World.  More information here, here, here and here.

Apache Spark is 1.0

Today, the Spark project announced availability of Apache Spark 1.0.0, the first major release since the Apache Foundation named Spark a top-level project.  (Additional announcements here, here and here). With 117 contributors, Spark continues to build critical mass and engagement in the data science community.

Features of the new release include:

  • API stability
  • Integration with YARN security
  • Operational and packaging improvements
  • Spark SQL (Alpha)
  • MLLib enhancements, including
    • Support for sparse feature vectors
    • Scalable decision trees for classification and regression
    • Distributed SVD and PCA
    • Model evaluation functions
    • L-BFGS optimization primitive
  • GraphX enhancements, including performance improvements in graph loading, edge reversal and neighborhood computation
  • Streaming enhancements, including optimized performance for stateful stream transformations, improved Flume support and automated state cleanup for long-running jobs
  • Extended Java and Python support
  • Significant improvements to documentation

…and many small improvements, documented in the Release Notes.

For more information on Spark, read this backgrounder.

 

 

 

 

Machine Learning in Hadoop: Part Two

This is the second of a three-part series on the current state of play for machine learning in Hadoop.  Part One is here.  In this post, we cover open source options.

As we noted in Part One, machine learning is one of several technologies for analytics; the broader category also includes fast queries, streaming analytics and graph engines.   This post will focus on machine learning, but it’s worth nothing that open source options for fast queries include Impala and Shark; for streaming analytics Storm, S4 and Spark Streaming; for graph engines Giraph, GraphLab and Spark GraphX.

Tools for machine learning in Hadoop can be classified into two main categories:

  • Software that enables integration between legacy machine learning tools and Hadoop in a “run-beside” architecture
  • Fully distributed machine learning software that integrates with Hadoop

There are two major open source projects in the first category.  The RHadoop project, developed and supported by Revolution Analytics, enables the R user to specify and run MapReduce jobs from R and work directly with data in HDFS and HBase.  RHIPE, a project led by Mozilla’s Suptarshi Guha, offers similar functionality, but without the HBase integration.

Both projects enable R users to implement explicit parallelization in MapReduce.  R users write R scripts specifically intended to be run as mappers and reducers in Hadoop.  Users must have MapReduce skills, and must refactor program logic for distributed execution.  There are some differences between the two projects:

  • RHadoop uses standard R functions for Mapping and Reducing; RHIPE uses unevaluated R expressions
  • RHIPE users work with data in key,value pairs; RHadoop loads data into familar R data frames
  • As noted above, RHIPE lacks an interface to HBase
  • Commercial support is available for RHadoop users who license Revolution R Enterprise; there is no commercial support available for RHIPE

Two open source projects for distributed machine learning in Hadoop stand out from the others: 0xdata’s H2O and Apache Spark’s MLLib.  Both projects have commercial backing, and show robust development activity.  Statistics from GitHub for the thirty days ended February 12 show the following:

  • 0xdata H2O: 18 contributors, 938 commits
  • Apache Spark: 77 contributors, 794 commits

H2O is a project of startup 0xdata, which operates on a services and support business model.  Recent coverage by this blog here;  additional coverage here, here and here.

MLLib is one of several projects included in Apache Spark.  Databricks and Cloudera offer commercial support.  Recent coverage by this blog here and here; additional coverage here, here, here and here.

As of this writing, H2O has more built-in analytic features than MLLib, and its R interface is more mature.  Databricks is sitting on a pile of cash to fund development, but its efforts must be allocated among several Spark projects, while 0xdata is solely focused on machine learning.

Cloudera’s decision to distribute Spark is a big plus for the project, but Cloudera is also investing heavily in its partnership with other machine learning vendors, such as SAS.  There is also a clear conflict between Spark’s fast query project (Shark) and Cloudera’s own Impala project.  Like most platform vendors, Cloudera will be customer-driven in its approach to applications like machine learning.

Two other open source projects deserve honorable mention, Apache Mahout and Vowpal Wabbit.  Development activity on these projects is much less robust than for H2O and Spark.  GitHub statistics for the thirty days ended February 12 speak volumes:

  • Apache Mahout: 5 contributors, 54 commits
  • Vowpal Wabbit: 8 contributors, 57 commits

Neither project has significant commercial backing.  Mahout is included in most Hadoop distributions, but distributors have done little to promote or contribute to the project.  (In 2013, Cloudera acquired Myrrix, one of the few companies attempting to commercialize Mahout).  John Langford of Microsoft Research leads the Vowpal Wabbit project, but it is a personal project not supported by Microsoft.

Mahout is relatively strong in unsupervised learning, offering a number of clustering algorithms; it also offers regular and stochastic singular value decomposition.  Mahout’s supervised learning algorithms, however, are weak.  Criticisms of Mahout tend to fall into two categories:

  • The project itself is a mess
  • Mahout’s integration into MapReduce is suitable only for high latency analytics

On the first point, Mahout certainly does seem eclectic, to say the least.  Some of the algorithms are distributed, others are single-threaded; others are simply imported from other projects.  Many algorithms are underdeveloped, unsupported or both.  The project is currently in a cleanup phase as it approaches 1.0 status; a number of underused and unsupported algorithms will be deprecated and removed.

“High latency” is code for slow.  Slow food is a thing; “slow analytics” is not a thing.  The issue here is that machine learning performance suffers from MapReduce’s need to persist intermediate results after each pass through the data; for competitive performance, iterative algorithms require an in-memory approach.

Vowpal Wabbit has its advocates among data scientists; it is fast, feature rich and runs in Hadoop.  Release 7.0 offers LDA clustering, singular value decomposition for sparse matrices, regularized linear and logistic regression, neural networks, support vector machines and sequence analysis.  Nevertheless, without commercial backing or a more active community, the project seems to live in a permanent state of software limbo.

In Part Three, we will cover commercial software for machine learning in Hadoop.