## The basic files and libraries needed for most presentations# creates the libraries and common-functions sections
read_chunk("../common/utility_functions.R")
+/- r Code
require(ggplot2) #for plotsrequire(lattice) # nicer scatter plotsrequire(plyr) # for processing data.framesrequire(grid) # contains the arrow functionrequire(doMC) # for parallel coderequire(png) # for reading png imagesrequire(gridExtra)
require(reshape2) # for the melt function#if (!require("biOps")) {# # for basic image processing# devtools::install_github("cran/biOps")# library("biOps")#}## To install EBImageif (!require("EBImage")) { # for more image processingsource("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("EBImage")
}
used.libraries<-c("ggplot2","lattice","plyr","reshape2","grid","gridExtra","biOps","png","EBImage")
+/- r Code
# start parallel environment
registerDoMC()
# functions for converting images back and forth
im.to.df<-function(in.img,out.col="val") {
out.im<-expand.grid(x=1:nrow(in.img),y=1:ncol(in.img))
out.im[,out.col]<-as.vector(in.img)
out.im
}
df.to.im<-function(in.df,val.col="val",inv=F) {
in.vals<-in.df[[val.col]]
if(class(in.vals[1])=="logical") in.vals<-as.integer(in.vals*255)
if(inv) in.vals<-255-in.vals
out.mat<-matrix(in.vals,nrow=length(unique(in.df$x)),byrow=F)
attr(out.mat,"type")<-"grey"
out.mat
}
ddply.cutcols<-function(...,cols=1) {
# run standard ddply command
cur.table<-ddply(...)
cutlabel.fixer<-function(oVal) {
sapply(oVal,function(x) {
cnv<-as.character(x)
mean(as.numeric(strsplit(substr(cnv,2,nchar(cnv)-1),",")[[1]]))
})
}
cutname.fixer<-function(c.str) {
s.str<-strsplit(c.str,"(",fixed=T)[[1]]
t.str<-strsplit(paste(s.str[c(2:length(s.str))],collapse="("),",")[[1]]
paste(t.str[c(1:length(t.str)-1)],collapse=",")
}
for(i in c(1:cols)) {
cur.table[,i]<-cutlabel.fixer(cur.table[,i])
names(cur.table)[i]<-cutname.fixer(names(cur.table)[i])
}
cur.table
}
show.pngs.as.grid<-function(file.list,title.fun,zoom=1) {
preparePng<-function(x) rasterGrob(readPNG(x,native=T,info=T),width=unit(zoom,"npc"),interp=F)
labelPng<-function(x,title="junk") (qplot(1:300, 1:300, geom="blank",xlab=NULL,ylab=NULL,asp=1)+
annotation_custom(preparePng(x))+
labs(title=title)+theme_bw(24)+
theme(axis.text.x = element_blank(),
axis.text.y = element_blank()))
imgList<-llply(file.list,function(x) labelPng(x,title.fun(x)) )
do.call(grid.arrange,imgList)
}
## Standard image processing tools which I use for visualizing the examples in the script
commean.fun<-function(in.df) {
ddply(in.df,.(val), function(c.cell) {
weight.sum<-sum(c.cell$weight)
data.frame(xv=mean(c.cell$x),
yv=mean(c.cell$y),
xm=with(c.cell,sum(x*weight)/weight.sum),
ym=with(c.cell,sum(y*weight)/weight.sum)
)
})
}
colMeans.df<-function(x,...) as.data.frame(t(colMeans(x,...)))
pca.fun<-function(in.df) {
ddply(in.df,.(val), function(c.cell) {
c.cell.cov<-cov(c.cell[,c("x","y")])
c.cell.eigen<-eigen(c.cell.cov)
c.cell.mean<-colMeans.df(c.cell[,c("x","y")])
out.df<-cbind(c.cell.mean,
data.frame(vx=c.cell.eigen$vectors[1,],
vy=c.cell.eigen$vectors[2,],
vw=sqrt(c.cell.eigen$values),
th.off=atan2(c.cell.eigen$vectors[2,],c.cell.eigen$vectors[1,]))
)
})
}
vec.to.ellipse<-function(pca.df) {
ddply(pca.df,.(val),function(cur.pca) {
# assume there are two vectors now
create.ellipse.points(x.off=cur.pca[1,"x"],y.off=cur.pca[1,"y"],
b=sqrt(5)*cur.pca[1,"vw"],a=sqrt(5)*cur.pca[2,"vw"],
th.off=pi/2-atan2(cur.pca[1,"vy"],cur.pca[1,"vx"]),
x.cent=cur.pca[1,"x"],y.cent=cur.pca[1,"y"])
})
}
# test function for ellipse generation# ggplot(ldply(seq(-pi,pi,length.out=100),function(th) create.ellipse.points(a=1,b=2,th.off=th,th.val=th)),aes(x=x,y=y))+geom_path()+facet_wrap(~th.val)+coord_equal()
create.ellipse.points<-function(x.off=0,y.off=0,a=1,b=NULL,th.off=0,th.max=2*pi,pts=36,...) {
if (is.null(b)) b<-a
th<-seq(0,th.max,length.out=pts)
data.frame(x=a*cos(th.off)*cos(th)+b*sin(th.off)*sin(th)+x.off,
y=-1*a*sin(th.off)*cos(th)+b*cos(th.off)*sin(th)+y.off,
id=as.factor(paste(x.off,y.off,a,b,th.off,pts,sep=":")),...)
}
deform.ellipse.draw<-function(c.box) {
create.ellipse.points(x.off=c.box$x[1],
y.off=c.box$y[1],
a=c.box$a[1],
b=c.box$b[1],
th.off=c.box$th[1],
col=c.box$col[1])
}
bbox.fun<-function(in.df) {
ddply(in.df,.(val), function(c.cell) {
c.cell.mean<-colMeans.df(c.cell[,c("x","y")])
xmn<-emin(c.cell$x)
xmx<-emax(c.cell$x)
ymn<-emin(c.cell$y)
ymx<-emax(c.cell$y)
out.df<-cbind(c.cell.mean,
data.frame(xi=c(xmn,xmn,xmx,xmx,xmn),
yi=c(ymn,ymx,ymx,ymn,ymn),
xw=xmx-xmn,
yw=ymx-ymn
))
})
}
# since the edge of the pixel is 0.5 away from the middle of the pixel
emin<-function(...) min(...)-0.5
emax<-function(...) max(...)+0.5
extents.fun<-function(in.df) {
ddply(in.df,.(val), function(c.cell) {
c.cell.mean<-colMeans.df(c.cell[,c("x","y")])
out.df<-cbind(c.cell.mean,data.frame(xmin=c(c.cell.mean$x,emin(c.cell$x)),
xmax=c(c.cell.mean$x,emax(c.cell$x)),
ymin=c(emin(c.cell$y),c.cell.mean$y),
ymax=c(emax(c.cell$y),c.cell.mean$y)))
})
}
common.image.path<-"../common"
qbi.file<-function(file.name) file.path(common.image.path,"figures",file.name)
qbi.data<-function(file.name) file.path(common.image.path,"data",file.name)
th_fillmap.fn<-function(max.val) scale_fill_gradientn(colours=rainbow(10),limits=c(0,max.val))
Quantitative Big Imaging
author: Kevin Mader
date: 7 May 2015
width: 1440
height: 900
transition: rotate
css: ../template.css
Scaling Up / Big Data
Course Outline
+/- r Code
source('../common/schedule.R')
19th February - Introduction and Workflows
26th February - Image Enhancement (A. Kaestner)
5th March - Basic Segmentation, Discrete Binary Structures
12th March - Advanced Segmentation
19th March - Applying Graphical Models and Machine Learning (A. Lucchi)
26th March - Analyzing Single Objects
2nd April - Analyzing Complex Objects
16th April - Groups and Spatial Distribution
23rd April - Statistics and Reproducibility
30th April - Dynamic Experiments
7th May - Scaling Up / Big Data
21th May - Guest Lecture, Applications in High-content Screening and Wood
Altintas, I. (2013). Workflow-driven programming paradigms for distributed analysis of biological big data. In 2013 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and medical Sciences (ICCABS) (pp. 1–1). IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICCABS.2013.6629243
Sitaram, D., & Manjunath, G. (2012). Moving To The Cloud. null (Vol. null). Elsevier. doi:10.1016/B978-1-59749-725-1.00006-8
Duan, P., Wang, W., Zhang, W., Gong, F., Zhang, P., & Rao, Y. (2013). Food Image Recognition Using Pervasive Cloud Computing. In 2013 IEEE International Conference on Green Computing and Communications and IEEE Internet of Things and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (pp. 1631–1637). IEEE. doi:10.1109/GreenCom-iThings-CPSCom.2013.296
Outline
Motivation
Computer Science Principles
Parallelism
Distributed Computing
Imperative Programming
Declarative Programming
Organization
Queue Systems / Cluster Computing
Parameterization
Databases
Big Data
MapReduce
Spark
Streaming
Cloud Computing
Beyond / The future
Motivation
There are three different types of problems that we will run into.
Really big data sets
Several copies of the dataset need to be in memory for processing
Computers with more 256GB are expensive and difficult to find
Even they have 16 cores so still 16GB per CPU
Drive speed / network file access becomes a limiting factor
If it crashes you lose everything
or you have to manually write a bunch of mess check-pointing code
Many datasets
For genome-scale studies 1000s of samples need to be analyzed identically
Dynamic experiments can have hundreds of measurements
Animal phenotyping can have many huge data-sets (1000s of 328GB datasets)
Radiologist in Switzerland alone make 1 Petabyte of scans per year
Exploratory Studies
Not sure what we are looking for
Easy to develop new analyses
Quick to test hypotheses
Example Projects
Zebra fish Full Animal Phenotyping
Full adult animal at cellular resolution
1000s of samples of full adult animals, imaged at 0.74 μm resolution: Images
11500 x 2800 x 628 ⟶ 20-40GVx / sample
Identification of single cells (no down-sampling)
Cell networks and connectivity
Classification of cell type
Registration with histology
Brain Project
Whole brain with cellular resolution
1 cm3 scanned at 1 μm resolution: Images ⟶ 1000 GVx / sample
Registration separate scans together
Blood vessel structure and networks
Registration with fMRI, histology
What is wrong with usual approaches?
Normally when problems are approached they are solved for a single task as quickly as possible
I need to filter my image with a median filter with a neighborhood of 5 x 5 and a square kernel
What if you want to look at 3D instead of 2D images?
What if you want to run the same analysis for a folder of images?
You have to rewrite everything, everytime
If you start with a bad approach, it is very difficult to fix, big data and reproducibility must be considered from the beginning
Computer Science Principles
Disclosure : There are entire courses / PhD thesis's / Companies about this, so this is just a quick introduction
Parallelism
Distributed Computing
Resource Contention
Shared-Memory
Race Conditions
Synchronization
Dead lock
Imperative
Declarative
What is parallelism?
Parallelism is when you can divide a task into separate pieces which can then be worked on at the same time.
For example
if you have to walk 5 minutes and talk on the phone for 5 minutes
you can perform the tasks serially which then takes 10 minutes
you can perform the tasks in parallel which then takes 5 minutes
Some tasks are easy to parallelize while others are very difficult. Rather than focusing on programming, real-life examples are good indicators of difficultly.
What is distributed computing?
Distributed computing is very similar to parallel computing, but a bit more particular. Parallel means you process many tasks at the same time, while distributed means you are no longer on the same CPU, process, or even on the same machine.
The distributed has some important implications since once you are no longer on the same machine the number of variables like network delay, file system issues, and other users becomes a major problem.
Distributed Computing Examples
You have 10 friends who collectively know all the capital cities of the world.
To find the capital of a single country you just yell the country and wait for someone to respond (+++)
To find who knows the most countries, each, in turn, yells out how many countries they know and you select the highest (++)
Each friend has some money with them
To find the total amount of money you tell each person to tell you how much money they have and you add it together (+)
To find the median coin value, you ask each friend to tell you you all the coins they have and you make one master list and then find the median coin (-)
Resource Contention
The largest issue with parallel / distributed tasks is the need to access the same resources at the same time
Parallel computing requires a significant of coordinating between computers for non-easily parallelizable tasks.
Mutability
The second major issue is mutability, if you have two cores / computers trying to write the same information at the same it is no longer deterministic (not good)
Blocking
The simple act of taking turns and waiting for every independent process to take its turn can completely negate the benefits of parallel computing
Distributed Challenges
Inherits all of the problems of parallel programming with a whole variety of new issues.
Sending Instructions / Data Afar
Fault Tolerance
If you have 1000 computers working on solving a problem and one fails, you do not want your whole job to crash
Data Storage
How can you access and process data from many different computers quickly without very expensive infrastructure
Imperative Programming
Directly coordinating tasks on a computer.
Languages like C, C++, Java, Matlab
Exact orders are given (implicit time ordering)
Data management is manually controlled
Job and task scheduling is manual
Potential to tweak and optimize performance
Making a soup
Buy vegetables at market
then Buy meat at butcher
then Chop carrots into pieces
then Chop potatos into pieces
then Heat water
then Wait until boiling then add chopped vegetables
then Wait 5 minutes and add meat
Declarative
Languages like SQL, Erlang, Haskell, Scala, Python, R can be declarative
Goals are stated rather than specific details
Data is automatically managed and copied
Scheduling is automatic but not always efficient
Making a soup
Buy vegetables at market →shopveggies
Buy meat at butcher →shopmeat
Wait for shopveggies: Chop carrots into pieces →choppedcarrots
Wait for shopveggies: Chop potatos into pieces →choppedpotatos
Heat water
Wait for boilingwater,choppedcarrots,choppedpotatos: Add chopped vegetables
Wait 5 minutes and add meat
Comparison
They look fairly similar, so what is the difference? The second is needlessly complicated for one person, but what if you have a team, how can several people make an imparitive soup faster (chopping vegetables together?)
Imperative soup
Buy {carrots, peas, tomatoes} at market
then Buy meat at butcher
then Chop carrots into pieces
then Chop potatos into pieces
then Heat water
then Wait until boiling then add chopped vegetables
then Wait 5 minutes and add meat
How can many people make a declarative soup faster? Give everyone a different task (not completely efficient since some tasks have to wait on others)
Declarative soup
Buy {carrots, peas, tomatoes} at market →shopveggies
Buy meat at butcher →shopmeat
Wait for shopveggies: Chop carrots into pieces →choppedcarrots
Wait for shopveggies: Chop potatos into pieces →choppedpotatos
Heat water
Wait for boilingwater,choppedcarrots,choppedpotatos: Add chopped vegetables
Wait 5 minutes and add meat
Results
Imperative
optimize specific tasks (chopping vegetables, mixing) so that many people can do it faster
Matlab/Python do this with fast-fourier-transforms (automatically uses many cores to compute faster)
make many soups at the same time (independent)
This leads us to cluster-based computing
Declarative
run everything at once
each core (computer) takes a task and runs it
execution order does not matter
wait for portions to be available (dependency)
Lazy Evaluation
do not run anything at all
until something needs to be exported or saved
run only the tasks that are needed for the final result
never buy tomatoes since they are not in the final soup
Organization
One of the major challenges of scaling up experiments and analysis is keeping all of the results organized in a clear manner. As we have seen in the last lectures, many of the results produced many text files
many files are difficult to organize
Matlab, R are designed for in-memory computation
Datasets can have many parameters and be complicated
Transitioning from Excel to Matlab or R means rewriting everything
Queue Computing
Queue processing systems (like Sun Grid Engine, Oracle Grid Engine, Apple XGrid, Condor, etc) are used to manage
resources (computers, memory, storage)
jobs (tasks to be run)
users
Based on a set of rules for how to share the resources to the users to run tasks.
Resources
a collection of processors (CPU and GPU)
memory, local storage
access to bandwidth or special resource like a printer
for a given period of time
Jobs
specific task to run
necessary (minimal/maximal) resources to run with
including execution time
Users
accounts submitting jobs
it can be undesirable for one user to dominate all of the resources all the time
Structure of Cluster
Master (or Name) Node(s)
The node with which every other node communicates, the main address.
Worker Nodes
The nodes where the computation is performed.
Scheduler
The actual process that decides which jobs will run using which resources (worker nodes, memory, bandwidth) at which time
Databases
A database is a collection of data stored in the format of tables: a number of columns and rows.
Animals
Here we have an table of the animals measured in an experiment and their weight
Relational-databases can store relationships between different tables so the relationship between Animal in table Cells and id in table Animals can be preserved.
SQL (pronounced Sequel) stands for structured query language and is nearly universal for both searching (called querying) and adding (called inserting) data into databases. SQL is used in various forms from Firefox storing its preferences locally (using SQLite) to Facebook storing some of its user information (MySQL and Hive).
So refering to the two tables we defined in the last entry, we can use SQL to get information about the tables independently of how they are stored (a single machine, a supercomputer, or in the cloud)
Basic queries
Get the volume of all cells
SELECT Volume FROM Cells→[1,2,0.95]
Get the average volume of all cancer cells
SELECT AVG(Volume) FROM Cells WHERE Type = "Cancer"→0.975
We could have done these easily without SQL using Excel, Matlab or R
More Advanced SQL
Get the volume of all cells in heavy mice
SELECT Volume FROM Cells WHERE Animal IN
(SELECT id FROM Animal WHERE Weight>80)
Get weight and average cell volume for all mice
SELECT ATable.Weight,CTable.Volume FROM Animals as ATable
INNER JOIN Cells as CTable on (ATable.id=CTable.Animal)
→[1,0.95]
Networks using SQL
If we expand our SQL example to cellular networks with an additional table explicitly describing the links between cells
Now to calculate how many connections each cell has
SELECT id,COUNT(*) AS connection_count FROM Cells
INNER JOIN Network ON (id=id1 OR id=id2)
→[(13)(21)(32)]
Beyond SQL: NoSQL
Basic networks can be entered and queries using SQL but relatively simple sounding requests can get complicated very quickly
How many cells are within two connections of each cell
SELECT id,COUNT(*) AS connection_count FROM Cells as CellsA
INNER JOIN Network as NetA ON Where (id=NetA.id1)
INNER JOIN Network as NetB ON Where (NetA.id2=NetB.id1)
This is still readable but becomes very cumbersome quickly and difficult to manage
NoSQL (Not Only SQL)
A new generation of database software which extends the functionality of SQL to allow for more scalability (MongoDB) or specificity for problems like networks or graphs called generally Graph Databases
Big Data: Definition
Velocity, Volume, Variety
When a ton of heterogeneous is coming in fast.
Performant, scalable, and flexible
When scaling isn't scary
10X, 100X, 1000X is the same amount of effort
When you are starving for enough data
Director of AMPLab said their rate limiting factor is always enough interesting data
O 'clicks' per sample
A brief oversimplified story
Google ran into 'big data' and its associated problems years ago: Peta- and exabytes of websites to collect and make sense of. Google uses an algorithm called PageRank(tm) for evaluating the quality of websites. They could have probably used existing tools if page rank were some magic program that could read and determine the quality of a site
for every_site_on_internet
current_site.rank=secret_pagerank_function(current_site)
end
Just divide all the websites into a bunch of groups and have each computer run a group, easy!
PageRank
While the actual internals of PageRank are not public, the general idea is that sites are ranked based on how many sites link to them
for current_site in every_site_on_internet
current_pagerank = new SecretPageRankObj(current_site);
for other_site in every_site_on_internet
if current_site is_linked_to other_site
current_pagerank.add_site(other_site);
end
end
current_site.rank=current_pagerank.rank();
end
How do you divide this task?
Maybe try and divide the sites up: english_sites, chinese_sites, ...
Run pagerank and run them separately.
What happens when a chinese_site links to an english_site?
Buy a really big, really fast computer?
On the most-powerful computer in the world, one loop would take months
It gets better
What happens if one computer / hard-drive crashes?
Have a backup computer replace it (A backup computer for every single system)
With a few computers ok, with hundreds of thousands of computers?
What if there is an earthquake and all the computers go down?
PageRank doesn't just count
Uses the old rankings for that page
Run pagerank many times until the ranks converge
Google's Solution: MapReduce (part of it)
some people claim to have had the idea before, Google is certainly the first to do it at scale
Several engineers at Google recognized common elements in many of the tasks being performed. They then proceeded to divide all tasks into two classes Map and Reduce
Map
Map is where a function is applied to every element in the list and the function depends only on exactly that element
→L=[1,2,3,4,5]f(x)=x2map(f→→L)=[1,4,9,16,25]
Reduce
Reduce is more complicated and involves aggregating a number of different elements and summarizing them. For example the Σ function can be written as a reduce function
→L=[1,2,3,4,5]g(a,b)=a+b
Reduce then applies the function to the first two elements, and then to the result of the first two with the third and so on until all the elements are done
reduce(f→→L)=g(g(g(g(1,2),3),4),5)
MapReduce
They designed a framework for handling distributing and running these types of jobs on clusters. So for each job a dataset (→L), Map-task (f), a grouping, and Reduce-task (g) are specified
Partition input data (→L) into chunks across all machines in the cluster
↓
The initial job was very basic, for more complicated jobs, a new notion of Key-value (KV) pairs must be introduced. A KV pair is made up of a key and value. A key must be comparable / hashable (a number, string, immutable list of numbers, etc) and is used for grouping data. The value is the associated information to this key.
Counting Words
Using MapReduce on a folder full of text-documents.
→L=["Info⋯","Expenses⋯",⋯]
Map is then a function f which takes in a long string and returns a list of all of the words (text seperated by spaces) as key-value pairs with the value being the number of times that word appeared
f(x) = [(word,1) for word in x.split(" ")]
Grouping is then performed by keys (group all words together)
Hadoop is the opensource version of MapReduce developed by Yahoo and released as an Apache project. It provides underlying infrastructure and filesystem that handles storing and distributing data so each machine stores some of the data locally and processing jobs run where the data is stored.
Non-local data is copied over the network.
Storage is automatically expanded with processing power.
It's how Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, ... deal with exabytes of data
Spark / Resilient Distributed Datasets
Technical Specifications
Developed by the Algorithms, Machines, and People Lab at UC Berkeley in 2012
General tool for all Directed Acyclical Graph (DAG) workflows
Course-grained processing → simple operations applied to entire sets
Map, reduce, join, group by, fold, foreach, filter,...
In-memory caching
Zaharia, M., et. al (2012). Resilient distributed datasets: a fault-tolerant abstraction for in-memory cluster computing
Practical Specification
Distributed, parallel computing without logistics, libraries, or compiling
Declarative rather than imperative
Apply operation f to each image / block
NOT tell computer 3 to wait for an image from computer 2 to and perform operation f and send it to computer 1
Even scheduling is handled automatically
Results can be stored in memory, on disk, redundant or not
Cloud Computing
Local resources are expensive and underutilized
Management and updates are expensive and require dedicated IT staff
Cloud Resources
Automatically setup
Unlimited potential capacity and storage
Cluster management already setup
Common tools with many people using the same
Near Future Imaging Goals
Needs
Scale up to 1000GVx samples (eventually)
Analyze standard measurements 14GVx regularly in a day
Analyze as fast as we usually measure 15 minutes / scan
Would be nice
Analyze scans as fast as we measure now (1 scan / minute)
Analyze scans as fast as we could measure with Gigafrost (10 scans / minute)
The results in the table show the within and between sample variation for selected phenotypes in the first two columns and the ratio of the within and between sample numbers
Visualizing the Variation
How does this result look visually? Each line shows the mean ± standard deviation for sample. The range within a single sample is clearly much larger than between
With the ability to scale to millions of samples there is no need to condense. We can analyze the entire dataset in real-time and try and identify groups or trends within the whole data instead of just precalculated views of it.
Practical
1276 comma separated text files with 56 columns of data and 15-60K rows
+/- r Code
results.df<-data.frame(Task=c("Load and Preprocess","Single Column Average","1 K-means Iteration"),
Single.Time=c("360 minutes","4.6s","2 minutes"),
Spark.Time=c("10 minutes","400ms","1s"))
names(results.df)[2]<-"Single Core Time"
names(results.df)[3]<-"Spark Time (40 cores)"
kable(results.df)
Task
Single Core Time
Spark Time (40 cores)
Load and Preprocess
360 minutes
10 minutes
Single Column Average
4.6s
400ms
1 K-means Iteration
2 minutes
1s
Can iteratively explore and hypothesis test with data quickly
We found several composite phenotypes which are more consistent within samples than between samples
Rich, heavily developed platform
Available Tools
Tools built for table-like data data structures and much better adapted to it.
Dozens of major companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Cisco, ...) donate over $30M a year to development of Spark and the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack
2 startups in the last 6 months with seed-funding in excess of $15M each
Academic Support
All source code is available on GitHub
Elegant (20,000 lines vs my PhD of 75,000+)
No patents or restrictions on usage
Machine Learning Course in D-INFK next semester based on Spark
Beyond: Streaming
Post-processing goals
Analysis done in weeks instead of months
Some real-time analysis and statistics
Streaming
Can handle static data or live data coming in from a 'streaming' device like a camera to do real-time analysis.
The exact same code can be used for real-time analysis and static code
Scalability
Connect more computers.
Start workers on these computer.
Beyond: Approximate Results
Projects at AMPLab like Spark and BlinkDB are moving towards approximate results.
Instead of mean(volume)
mean(volume).within_time(5)
mean(volume).within_ci(0.95)
For real-time image processing it might be the only feasible solution and could drastically reduce the amount of time spent on analysis.