Data-Intensive Computing to Simulate the Brain

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Understanding how the human brain works will take more than brains. Along with the planet’s smartest scientific minds, it will take never-before-achieved computing capabilities. The science and technology required to decode the human brain is a scientific final frontier …  and Professor Dr. Dirk Pleiter is on the front lines. The theoretical physics professor and research group leader at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Jülich, Germany, is part of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year-long European research initiative tasked with creating a working simulation of the brain. “Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science,” states the HBP’s report to the European Commission. “If ... [ Read More ]

Cray’s New Urika-XC Suite: the Convergence of Supercomputing and Analytics

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Cray today announced the launch of the Cray® Urika®-XC analytics software suite, which brings graph analytics, deep learning and robust big data analytics tools to the company’s flagship line of Cray® XC™ supercomputers. The Cray Urika-XC analytics software suite empowers data scientists to make breakthrough discoveries previously hidden within massive datasets, and achieve faster time to insight while leveraging the scale and performance of Cray XC supercomputers. With the Urika-XC software suite, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads can run alongside scientific modeling and simulations on XC supercomputers, eliminating costly and time-consuming movement of data between systems. Cray XC customers will be able to ... [ Read More ]

Data Analytics Rule at Spark Summit West 2017

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Spark Summit West is always well attended, and this year was no exception. Data engineers, data scientists, programmers, architects and technology enthusiasts descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center earlier this month to learn all about the latest developments with Apache Spark™ and its massive ecosystem. Complexity of analytics use cases and data science was a dominant theme throughout this year’s event. The keynote by the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, highlighted some of the challenges with implementing large-scale analytics projects. Ghodsi discussed how the continued growth of Apache Spark has resulted in myriad innovative uses cases, from churn analytics to genome sequencing. These applications are ... [ Read More ]

Urika-GX: A Game Changer for Big Data Analytics

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There’s a lot of hype around big data in healthcare and the life sciences. But big data is here to stay. Information is what drives the entire industry. When I worked in big pharma, I learned that the product of a pharmaceutical company is not a pill, it's a label. And a label is just a specific assemblage of information, carefully distilled from terabytes of information collected and analyzed over the course of many years by many intelligent people. To compete, companies have to be very good at turning data into information, and information into knowledge. The stakes couldn't be higher, because every day millions of patients rely on the quality of this data and the strength of the analyses done by researchers. Analyzing big data is ... [ Read More ]

Graph Databases: Key Thoughts from Online Chat

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It’s pretty interesting to see graph analytics gain traction in the work of big data. We’ve been focusing on graph databases to round out Hadoop® and Spark™ ecosystems and allow for more advanced analytics — and enable people to uncover never-before-seen patterns. (Tell me that’s not cool!) From solving real-world problems such as detecting cyberattacks and creating value from IoT sensor data to precisely identifying drug interactions faster than ever before, graph has become a powerhouse in looking at complex, irregular and very large datasets to identify patterns in near real-time. On March 16, we hosted an online chat titled “Graph: The Missing Link in Big Data Analytics” with industry experts from Deloitte and Mphasis. Sixty-one ... [ Read More ]