Nvidia is fully embracing the effectiveness of GPUs for running deep learning algorithms, releasing over the weekend a new set of libraries designed to let researchers experience the performance boost of GPUs without having to optimize their models for the hardware.…
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Databricks raises $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, wants to take on MapReduce with Spark
A team of professors behind the open source Spark and Shark in-memory big data projects has raised $13.9 million to commercialize the products via a company called Databricks. Spark and Shark are designed to be much faster and more flexible than Hadoop MapReduce and Hive.…
Read MoreSimulating 1 second of real brain activity takes 40 minutes and 83K processors
Researchers have simulated 1 second of real brain activity, on a network equivalent to 1 percent of an actual brain's neural network, using the world's fourth-fastest supercomputer. The results aren't revolutionary just yet, but they do hint at what will be possible as computing power increases.…
Read MoreRainStor raises $12M to make your big data small
Big data company RainStor has raised $12 million is Series C funding for its database that's designed to shrink data footprints by at least 95 percent. It also plays nice with Hadoop, meaning a system can handle ad hoc SQL queries as well as MapReduce jobs.…
Read MoreResearchers using AI to build robotic bees
Building a robotic bee that acts like a real bee is a lot more complicated than programming a robot to fly around from flower to flower. A project called Green Brain aims to build an artificial intelligence system that can actually mimic a bee's brain.…
Read MoreSupercomputing’s problem isn’t power, it’s software
Getting to next generation systems in high performance computing has inspired technologies that we now use everyday in data centers, but as the drive for exascale computing continues, it seems ingenuity is coming to an end. But is power consumption the real hurdle for bigger systems?…
Read MoreMeet the new breed of HPC vendor
The face of high-performance computing is changing. That means new technologies and new names, but also familiar names in new places. Anyone that doesn't have a cloud computing story to tell, possibly a big data one too, might starting looking really old really quickly.…
Read MoreConcurrent raises $900K to make Hadoop easier
Concurrent, the company providing the Cascading data workflow API, has raised a $900,000 seed round to capitalize on the newfound excitement around Hadoop. Cascading is an open-source API for creating and running data workflows atop Hadoop clusters.…
Read MoreNeed cash? Forget plasma, and donate CPU time instead.
Do you sleep? Have a laptop or desktop that sits idle during those eight hours? Need an extra $10 a month? If so, startup CPUsage has a proposition that you should hear.…
Read MoreLexisNexis open-sources its Hadoop killer
LexisNexis is releasing a set of open-source, data-processing tools it says outperforms Hadoop and even handles workloads that Hadoop presently cannot. There have been calls for a legitimate alternative to Hadoop, and this certainly looks like one.…
Read MoreBig data on micro servers? You bet.
Online dating service eHarmony is using SeaMicro's specialized Intel Atom-powered servers as the foundation of its Hadoop infrastructure, demonstrating that big data applications such as Hadoop might be a killer app for low-powered micro servers.…
Read MoreDemocratizing big data — is Hadoop our only hope?
Is Hadoop our only hope for solving big data challenges? From scalability to fault tolerance, Hadoop does myriad things very well. Yet, Hadoop is not the solution to all big data problems and use cases. Several key issues remain, including investment, complexity and batch-only processing.…
Read MoreNutanix Gets $13.2M for Google-like Storage Architecture
Nutanix startup that sells an appliance combining computing and storage on the same nodes, has raised $13.2 million. The company is developing an appliance combining computing and storage on the same server nodes, a story that should resonate with customers concerned with scalability and performance.…
Read MorePiccolo Project Tries to Speed Past Hadoop
Few would argue that Hadoop doesn't have a bright future as a foundational element of big data stacks, but Piccolo, a new project out of New York University, is moving data in-memory in an attempt to improve parallel-processing performance beyond what Hadoop and/or MapReduce can do.…
Read MoreWhy Hadoop-like ‘Dryad’ Could Be Microsoft’s Big Data Star
On Friday, Microsoft’s HPC division opened up the company’s Dryad parallel-processing technologies as a Community Technology Preview (CTP). Dryad could be a rousing success, in part because Hadoop -- which is written in Java -- is not ideally suited to run atop Windows or support .NET applications.…
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