Atbrox is startup company providing technology and services for Search and Mapreduce/Hadoop. Our background is from Google, IBM and research.

Update 2010-July-13: Can remove towards from the title of this posting today, Amazon just launched cluster compute instances with 10GB network bandwidth between nodes (and presents a run that enters top 500 list at 146th place, I estimate the run to cost ~$20k).

The Top 500 list is for supercomputers what Fortune 500 is for companies. About 80% of the list are supercomputers built by either Hewlett Packard or IBM, other major supercomputing vendors on the list include Dell, Sun (Oracle), Cray and SGI. Parallel linpack benchmark result is used as the ranking function for the list position (a derived list – green 500 – also includes power-efficiency in the ranking).

Trends towards Cloud Supercomputing
To our knowledge the entire top 500 list is currently based on physical supercomputer installations and no cloud computing configurations (i.e. virtual configurations lasting long enough to calculate the linpack benchmark), that will probably change within in a few years. There are however trends towards cloud-based supercomputing already (in particular within consumer internet services and pharmaceutical computations), here are some concrete examples:

1. Zynga (online casual games, e.g. Farmville and Mafia Wars)
   Zynga uses 12000 Amazon EC2 nodes (ref: Manager of Cloud Operations at Zynga)

2. Animoto (online video production service)
   Animoto scaled from 40 to 4000 EC2 nodes in 3 days (ref: CTO, Animoto)

3. Myspace (social network)
   Myspace simulated 1 million simultaneous users using 800 large EC2 nodes (3200 cores) (ref: highscalability.com)

4. New York Times
   New York Times used hundreds of EC2 nodes to process their archives in 36 hours (ref: The New York Times Archives + Amazon Web Services = TimesMachine)

5. Reddit (news service)
   Reddit uses 218 EC2 nodes (ref: I run reddit’s servers)

Examples with (rough) estimates

1. Justin.tv (video service)
   In october 2009 Justin.tv users watched 50 million hours of video, and they cost (reported earlier) was about 1 penny per user-video-hour, a very rough estimate would be monthly costs of 50M/0.01 = 500k$, i.e. 12*500k$ = 6M$ anually. Assuming that half their costs are computational, this would be about 3M$/(24*365*0.085) ~ 4029 EC2 nodes 24×7 through the year, but since they are a video site bandwidth is probably a significant fraction of the cost, so cutting the rough estimate in half to around 2000 EC2 nodes.
   (ref: Watching TV Together, Miles Apart and Justin.tv wins funding, opens platform)

2. Newsweek
   Newsweek saves up to $500.000 per year by moving to the cloud, assuming they cut their spending in half by using the cloud that would correspond to $500.000/(24h/day*365d/y*0.085$/h) ~ 670 EC2 nodes 24×7 through the year (probably a little less due to storage and bandwidth costs)
   (ref: Newsweek.com Explores Amazon Cloud Computing)

3. Recovery.gov
   Recory.gov saves up to $420.000 per year by moving to the cloud, assuming they cut their spending in half by using the cloud that would correspond to $420.000/(24h/day*365d/y*0.085$/h) ~ 560 EC2 nodes 24×7 through the year (probably a little less due to storage and bandwidth costs). (ref: Feds embrace cloud computing; move Recovery.gov to Amazon EC2)

Other examples of Cloud Supercomputing

1. Pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and Genentech
   Offloading computations to the cloud (ref: Biotech HPC in the Cloud and The new computing pioneers)

2. Pathwork Diagnostics
   Using EC2 for cancer diagnostics (ref: Of Unknown Origin: Diagnosing Cancer in the Cloud)

Best regards,

Amund Tveit

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We developed a tool for scalable language processing for our customer Lingit using Amazon’s Elastic Mapreduce.

More details: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/atbrox/

Contact us if you need help with Hadoop/Elastic Mapreduce.

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Elastic Mapreduce default behavior is to read from and store to S3. When you need to access other AWS services, e.g. SQS queues or database services SimpleDB and RDS (MySQL) the best approach from Python is to use Boto. To get Boto to work with Elastic Mapreduce you need to dynamically load boto on each mapper and reducer, Cloudera’s Jeff Hammerbacher outlined how to do that using Hadoop Distributed Cache and Peter Skomorroch suggested how to load Boto to access Elastic Blockstore (EBS), this posting is based on those ideas and gives a detailed description how to do it.

How to combine Elastic Mapreduce with other AWS Services

This posting shows how to load boto in an Elastic Mapreduce mapper and gives a simple example how to use simpledb from the same mapper. For accessing other AWS services, e.g. SQS from Elastic Mapreduce check out the Boto documentation (it is quite easy when the boto + emr integration is in place).

Other tools used (prerequisites):

• s3cmd – to upload/download files to S3
• Elastic Mapreduce Ruby Client – to launch Elastic Mapreduce jobs

Step 1 – getting and preparing the Boto library

wget http://boto.googlecode.com/files/boto-1.8d.tar.gz
# note: using virtualenv can be useful if you want to
# keep your local Python installation clean
tar -zxvf boto-1.8d.tar.gz ; cd boto-1.8d ; python setup.py install
cd /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/boto-1.8d-py2.6.egg
zip -r boto.mod boto

Step 2 – mapper that loads boto.mod and uses it to access SimpleDB

# this was tested by adding code underneath to the mapper
# s3://elasticmapreduce/samples/wordcount/wordSplitter.py

# get boto library
sys.path.append(".")
import zipimport
importer = zipimport.zipimporter('boto.mod')
boto = importer.load_module('boto')

# access simpledb
sdb = boto.connect_sdb("YourAWSKey", "YourSecretAWSKey")
sdb_domain = boto.create_domain("mymapreducedomain") # or get_domain()
# ..
# write words to simpledb
  for word in pattern.findall(line):
      item = sdb_domain.create_item(word)
      item["reversedword"] = word[::-1]
      item.save()
      # ...

Step 3 – json config file – bototest.json – for Elastic Mapreduce Ruby Client

[
  {
	"Name": "Step 1: testing boto with elastic mapreduce",
        "ActionOnFailure": "<action_on_failure>",
        "HadoopJarStep": {
		"Jar": "/home/hadoop/contrib/streaming/hadoop-0.18-streaming.jar",
          	"Args": [
            	"-input", "s3n://elasticmapreduce/samples/wordcount/input",
            	"-output", "s3n://yours3bucket/result",
            	"-mapper", "s3://yours3bucket/botoWordSplitter.py",
            	"-cacheFile", "s3n://yours3bucket/boto.mod#boto.mod",
          	]
        }
  }
]

Step 4 – Copy necessary files to s3

s3cmd put boto.mod s3://yours3bucket
s3cmd put botoWordSplitter.py s3://yours3bucket

Step 5 – And run your Elastic Mapreduce job

 elastic-mapreduce --create \
                   --stream \
                   --json bototest.json \
                   --param "<action_on_failure>=TERMINATE_JOB_FLOW"

Conclusion
This showed how to dynamically load boto and use it to access one other AWS service – SimpleDB – from Elastic Mapreduce. Boto supports most AWS services, so the same integration approach should work also for other AWS services, e.g. SQS (Queuing Service), RDS (MySQL Service) and EC2, check out the Boto API documentation or Controlling the Cloud with Python for details.

Note: a very similar integration approach should work for most Python libraries, also those that use/wrap C/C++ code (e.g. machine learning libraries such as PyML and others), but then it might be needed to do step 1 on Debian AMIs similar to what Elastic Mapreduce is using, check out a previous posting for more info about such AMIs.

Do you need help with Hadoop/Mapreduce?
A good start could be to read this book, or contact Atbrox if you need help with development or parallelization of algorithms for Hadoop/Mapreduce – info@atbrox.com. See our posting for an example parallelizing and implementing a machine learning algorithm for Hadoop/Mapreduce

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