Tag: Tachyon

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 Summit 2015: Preliminary Report

So I guess Spark really is enterprise ready.  Nick Heudecker, call your office.

There are several key themes coming from the Summit:

Spark Continues to Mature

Spark and its contributors deserve a round of applause.  Some key measures of growth since the 2014 Summit:

  • Contributor headcount increased from 255 to 730
  • Committed lines of code increased from 175K to 400K

There is increasing evidence of Spark’s scalability:

  • Largest cluster: 8,000 nodes
  • Largest job: 1 petabyte
  • Top streaming intake: 1TB/hour

Project Tungsten aims to make Spark faster and prepare for the next five years; the project has already accomplished significant performance improvements through better use of memory and CPU.

IBM and Spark

IBM drops the big one with its announcement.  Key bits from the announcement:

  • IBM will build Spark into the core of its analytic and commerce products, including IBM Watson Health Cloud
  • IBM will open source its machine learning library (System ML) and work with Databricks to port it to Spark.
  • IBM will offer Spark as a Cloud service on Bluemix.
  • IBM will commit 3,500 developers to Spark-related projects.
  • IBM (and its partners) will train more than a million people on Spark

I will post separately on this next week

Spark is Enterprise-Ready

If IBM’s announcement is not sufficient to persuade skeptics, presentations from Adobe, Airbnb, Baidu, Capital One, CIA, NASA/JPL, NBC Universal, Netflix, Thompson Reuters, Toyota and many others demonstrate that Spark already supports enterprise-level workloads.

In one of the breakouts, Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji of Databricks presented results from his analysis of more than 150 production deployments of Spark.  As expected, organizations use Spark for BI and advanced analytics; the big surprise is that 60% use non-HDFS data sources.  These organizations use Spark for data consolidation on the fly, decoupling compute from storage, with unification taking place on the processing layer.

Databricks Cloud is GA

Enough said.

SparkR

Spark 1.4 includes R bindings, opening Spark to the large community of R users.  Out of the gate, the R interface enables the R user to leverage Spark DataFrames; the Spark team plans to extend the capability to include machine learning APIs in Spark 1.5.

Spark’s Expanding Ecosystem

Every major Hadoop distributor showed up this year, but there were no major announcements from the distributors (other than IBM’s bombshell).

In other developments:

  • Amazon Web Services announced availability of a new Spark on EMR service
  • Intel announced a new Streaming SQL project for Spark
  • Lucidworks showcased its Fusion product, with Spark embedded
  • Alteryx announced its plans to integrate with Spark in its Release 10

One interesting footnote — while there were a number of presentations about Tachyon last year, there were none this year.

These are just the key themes.  I’ll publish a more detailed story next week.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 23, 2015)

This week, Spark Summit East produced a deluge of news and analysis on Apache Spark and Databricks.  Also in the news: a couple of ventures landed funding, SAP released software and SAS soft-launched something new for SAS Visual Analytics.

Analytic Startups

Venture Capital Dispatch on WSJ.D reports that Andreeson Horowitz has invested $7.5 million in AMPLab spinout Tachyon Nexus.  Tachyon Nexus supports the eponymous Tachyon project, a memory-centric storage layer that runs underneath Apache Spark or independently.

Social media mining venture Dataminr pulls $130 million in “D” round financing, demonstrating that the real money in analytics is in applications, not algorithms.

Apache Flink

On the Flink project blog, Fabian Hueske posts an excellent article that describes how joins work in Flink.

Apache Spark

ADTMag rehashes the tired debate about whether Spark and Hadoop are “friends” or “foes”.  Sounds like teens whispering in the hallways of Silicon Valley High.  Spark works with HDFS, and it works with other datastores; it all depends on your use case.  If that means a little less buzz for Hadoop purists, get over it.

To that point, Matt Kalan explains how to use Spark with MongoDB on the Databricks blog.

A paper published by a team at Berkeley summarizes results from Spark benchmark testing, draws surprising conclusions.

In other commentary about Spark:

  • TechCrunch reports on the growth of Spark.
  • TechRepublic wonders if anything can dim Spark.
  • InfoWorld lists five reasons to use Spark for Big Data.

In VentureBeat, Sharmila Mulligan relates how ClearStory Data’s big bet on Spark paid off without explaining the nature of the payoff.  ClearStory has a nice product, but it seems a bit too early for a victory lap.

On the Spark blog, Justin Kestelyn describes exactly-once Spark Streaming with Apache Kafka, a new feature in Spark 1.3.

Databricks

Doug Henschen chides Ion Stoica for plugging Databricks Cloud at Spark Summit East, hinting darkly that some Big Data vendors are threatened by Spark and trying to plant FUD about it.  Vendors planting FUD about competitors that threaten them: who knew that people did such things?  It’s not clear what revenue model Henschen thinks Databricks should pursue; as Hortonworks’ numbers show, “contributing to open source” alone is not a viable business model.  If those Big Data vendors are unhappy that Databricks Cloud competes with what they offer, there is nothing to stop them from embracing Spark and standing up their own cloud service.

In other news:

  • On the Databricks blog, the folks from Uncharted Software describe PanTera, cool visualization software that runs in Databricks Cloud.
  • Rob Marvin of SD Times rounds up new product announcements from Spark Summit East.
  • In PCWorld, Joab Jackson touts the benefits of Databricks Cloud.
  • ConsumerElectronicsNet recaps Databricks’ announcement of the Jobs feature for Databricks Cloud, plus other news from Spark Summit East.
  • On ZDNet, Toby Wolpe reviews the new Jobs feature for production workloads in Databricks Cloud.
  • On the Databricks blog, Abi Mehta announces that Tresata’s TEAK application for AML will be implemented on Databricks Cloud.  Media coverage here, here and here.

Geospatial

MemSQL announced geospatial capabilities for its distributed in-memory NewSQL database.

J. Andrew Rogers asks why geospatial databases are hard to build, then answers his own question.

RapidMiner

Butler Analytics publishes a favorable review of RapidMiner.

SAP

SAP released a new on-premises version of Lumira Edge for visualization, adding to the list of software that is not as good as Tableau.  SAP also released Predictive Analytics 2.0, a product that marries the toylike SAP Predictive Analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight, a product acquired in 2013.  According to SAP, Predictive Analytics 2.0 is a “single, unified analytics product” with two work environments, which sounds like SAP has bundled two different code bases into a marketing bundle with a common datastore.  Going for a “three-fer”, SAP also adds Lumira Edge to the bundle.

SAS

American Banker reports that SAS has “launched” SAS Transaction Monitoring Optimization for AML scenario testing; in this case, “launch”, means marketing collateral is available.  The product is said to run on top of SAS Visual Analytics, which itself runs on top of SAS LASR Server, SAS’ “other” distributed in-memory platform.