The Austin Hadoop User Group

2012 - January Meeting

2012-01-16T10:33:00.000-08:00

Our next meeting will be on Thursday the 26th of January at Bazaarvoice from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:25 : "Small and Big Data at Bazaarvoice" - Alex Pinkin, Lead Developer Data Infrastructure, Bazaarvoice- @apinkin

Alex will be presenting on the data infrastructure powering over 5 Billion page views per month. The presentation will cover the use of RDBMS, NoSQL and Hadoop at Bazaarvoice.

7:25 - 7:45 : "SOLR Power FTW" - Robby Morgan, Lead Developer, Bazaarvoice

Robbie will present a case study from a large scale deployment of Apache SOLR, an open source Lucene based search platform.

7:45 - 8:30 : "Gathering, Quantifying & Visualizing Private Equity Data" - Steve Watt, Hewlett-Packard - @wattsteve

Steve will present on a "Data Science" project where he mined the web, quantified the amount of venture capital invested in the USA from 2005 to 2010 and analyzed its distribution across sectors and by location. It will be presented in a tutorial format covering the use of Apache Nutch for web crawling, Apache Pig and Hadoop for analyzing the data and Protovis/D3 for creating the choropleth visualizations.

Location

Bazaarvoice is located here (Map)

When you arrive at Bazaarvoice, you can park in any of the open spots outside the building or in the garage next to the building. The meetup will be on the second floor. Take the elevator up to the 2nd floor and then follow the signs to the meeting room.

Sponsored By

2011 - July Meeting

2011-06-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday July the 13th at CoSpace Austin from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:25 : "Dexy Demo" - Ana Nelson, OpenGamma - @ananelson

Ana is the author of Dexy, an open source tool that allows one to create elegant, reproducible documents which include graphs and analysis from raw data and code.

7:30 - 8:10 : "Data in the Digital Age" - Kaitlin Thaney, Digital Science - @kaythaney

Kaitlin will be presenting on the data ecosystem and discuss how the way we interact with data is changing in the digital age and the challenges and opportunities presented. The presentation will have a focus on scientific research.

8:10 - 9:00 : "How Bitly scales data storage and processing" - Hilary Mason, Bitly - @hmason

Hilary will be presenting on some of the unique data storage and processing challenges they encounter at Bitly and how they address them. She will also be covering some of the algorithms that are used at Bitly.

Location

Directions to CoSpace are available here

Sponsored By

2011 - June Meeting

2011-06-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Our June Meeting will be another joint meeting with GeekAustin and the Cassandra Austin Meetup. Tyler Hobbs from DataStax will be speaking on Brisk at Pervasive on June 20th from 6-9 PM.

Please sign up on EventBrite so we can get an idea of how many folks are attending.

DataStax Brisk integrates Apache Hadoop with Apache Cassandra which provides you with the ability to run Map/Reduce Analytics workloads on top of the Apache Cassandra real-time Columnar Data Store.

Other Big Data Related Events in June

June 27th : The Hive Happy Hour in Santa Clara, CA

June 28th : Big Data Camp in Santa Clara, CA

June 29th : The Yahoo Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, CA

Location

Pervasive Software - Map

12365-B Riata Trace Parkway Austin, TX 78727

2011 April Meeting

2011-04-07T13:56:00.000-07:00

Our April Meeting will be a joint meeting with GeekAustin who is hosting a "Machine Learning with Mahout" meetup at J.J. Pickle Research Campus on April 21st from 7-9 PM. Please sign up on EventBrite so we can get an idea of how many folks are attending.

Apache Mahout provides a set of machine learning libraries that run on top of Apache Hadoop. This is interesting in that it allows you to gain deeper insights into your data (Clustering, Classification) when contrasted with your typical text extraction analytics that are run with Pig or Hive.

Location

Big Tex Auditorium
J.J. Pickle Research Campus
10100 Burnet Road
Austin, TX 78758

2011 March Meetups

2011-03-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

March is here and that means one thing... SXSW ! We won't be having an official meeting this month due to the fact that we have SXSW Interactive and The Data Cluster Party. The sessions/events below are all organized by Austinites, so please come out and support them. There are other big data sessions but I wanted to highlight the ones that were local. Our regular meetings will be picking up again in April.

Note: The Data Cluster Party does not require a badge, but the rest of the events do.

March 12 - Big Data, Hadoop and You: How to rock out with Big Data - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=195893600434618

March 13 - Data Cluster Party - http://dataclusterparty2011.eventbrite.com/

March 14 - Big Data For Everyone - http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7475

March 14 - A Billion Columns? No problem: an Introduction to the Cassandra Database - http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7965

2011 February Meeting

2011-02-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

Our next meeting will be on February the 17th at CoSpace Austin from 6:30 - 9pm.

As usual we'll have plenty of Pizza, Beer and Tacos. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:45 : "Flume" - Jonathan Hsieh, Cloudera - @jmhsieh

Jonathan Hsieh is a Flume Committer and the Project Lead. He'll be presenting on how you can use Flume to centrally manage the collection, aggregation and distribution of huge amounts of log data. He'll also cover the latest release of Flume (0.9.3) and conclude with a demo .

7:45 - 8:15 : "Graph processing at Web Scale with Google Pregel and Golden Orb" - Zach Richardson, Ravel - @jzachrichardson

Google has recently published a new white paper on Pregel, a graph processing runtime capable of running arbitrary graph algorithms at web scale. Zach has taken the specifications described in the paper and built Golden Orb, an Apache licensed open sourced equivalent that runs on Hadoop, and is in process to be submitted to the Apache incubator.

Location

Directions to CoSpace are available here

Sponsorship

This event wouldn't have been possible if it was not sponsored by the awesome folks at RackSpace and Cloudera

2011 January Meeting

2011-01-12T13:46:00.000-08:00

Our January Meeting will be the Data Day Austin Conference on January 29th. Our user group is co-hosting the event along with GeekAustin and Riptano. See the event link for registration and location details - http://datadayaustin.eventbrite.com/

The Schedule is still being finalized, but you can see the speakers being added in realtime at the EventBrite link. The conference is hands on. i.e. Bring your laptops. The intent is that when you leave you will actually be able to do the things being presented.

These skills are in extremely short supply and we want to cement Austin's position as a premiere destination for Big Data. This is why we are putting this on. Quite frankly, the amount of people available with these skills is not commensurate with the demand for them, This
is the perfect event to bring your coworkers and friends along to in order to help them become proficient in working with Big Data.

I'm also hoping this event will be a catalyst that helps grow our local Big Data community for this coming year.

Lastly, some Big Data events on the horizon:

O'Reilly Strata Conference - Feb 1-3, Santa Clara, CA - http://strataconf.com/strata2011

SXSW Interactive - March 11-13, Austin, TX (Featuring a Local Big Data Panel) - http://sxsw.com/interactive

Data Cluster Party - March 13, Austin, TX - http://dataclusterparty2011.eventbrite.com/

Structure Big Data - March 23, New York City - http://events.gigaom.com/bigdata/

2010 November 11th Meeting

2010-10-22T14:57:00.000-07:00

Our next meeting will be held on the 11th of November at CoSpace Austin.

This is going to be the last meeting of the year and its going to be awesome. We have 3 great sessions and loads of pizza, tacos and beer. Consider it the geek start to the festive season, especially if you're sporting a sweet Movember Stash.

This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:45 : "Apache Cassandra 0.7" - Jonathan Ellis, Riptano, Apache Cassandra PMC Chair - @spyced

This session will cover Cassandra and its main use cases and also provide a response to recent mentions to Cassandra deployments in the technology press. The session will go on to discuss the new features in the 0.7 release and then conclude with a demo/code walkthrough of how to actually use Cassandra in the real world, showing how to load data into Cassandra and then access it via the Cassandra API from another application.

7:45 - 8:15 : "Million Fold Mashups and the Shape of Data" - Flip Kromer, InfoChimps - @mrflip

Typically, AHUG talks focus on the tools and methods for working with massive data. I'd like to focus instead on our stock in trade, the data itself. I'll describe interesting and unexpected themes in the public and commercially available data that's out there; new mechanisms for the creation of humanity-scale datasets; and the challenges and opportunities of wiring that data up into a connected millionfold-mashup whole.

8:15 - 8:45 : "Saving lives with Big Data - the Chilean Earthquake Crisis" - Steve Watt, IBM - @wattsteve

This session will provide an explanation and demonstration of a solution our team created using the Apache Big Data stack that mines social media (such as Twitter) in the event of a Crisis (The Chilean Earthquake) allowing one to divine actionable information from your ad-hoc network on the ground and present it in a contextually relevant, human comprehensible format on a map.

Location

Directions to CoSpace are available here

Sponsorship

This event wouldn't have been possible if it was not sponsored by the awesome folks at RackSpace and Riptano

2010 September 23rd Meeting

2010-09-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

Our next meeting will be held on the 23rd of September at Pervasive

This month's meeting focus is on Performance and Throughput for Big Data. This event is free and open to everyone. We have lots of people that come that are new to Hadoop and Big Data.

Agenda

6:30 - 7:00 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

7:00 - 7:30 : "Realtime Classification at Scale"

Click Forensics helps large ad networks and online advertisers improve traffic acquisition and monetization. Next to working with Hadoop and very large data sets, some of our customers have strong real-time requirements. In this presentation, Click Forensics will outline how they created a real-time classifier that allows for 1 billion scoring transactions per server per day on commodity hardware with response latencies under 1 ms.

7:30 - 8:00 : "Revolutionary performance in Big Data crunching: New benchmarks using a Hadoop Appliance, and leveraging HBase and Pervasive DataRush together"

Mike Hoskins, Pervasive CTO, describes his Innovation Lab’s work on big data analytics, illustrated with Genomic and Weblog benchmarks – reflecting both absolute throughput, and green-efficiency. We’ll look at how we are combining Pervasive DataRush (delivers fine-grained, thread-level massive parallelism on multicore, with auto-scaling and simple dataflow programming model, see: www.pervasivedatarush.com), with HDFS and HBase. The result: 200-300x price/performance gains over traditional cluster implementations.

Location

Pervasive is located at (See Map):

12365B Riata Trace Parkway

Austin, TX 78727

512 231 6850

Big Data Companies in Austin

2010-08-10T14:47:00.001-07:00

This is a list of some of the companies working with or on Big Data Technologies in Austin. Contact me to be added to this list.

Click Forensics, Inc.
Technologies: Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Mahout
Application: Data mining and machine learning with very large online advertising data sets

IBM
Technologies: Hadoop, Cassandra, Zookeeper, Hive, Pig

InfoChimps
Technologies: Hadoop, Cassandra, Pig, WuKong

Pervasive Software
Technologies: Pervasive DataRush, Hadoop, Pig and Hive

Potomac Fusion - Hiring!
Technologies: Hadoop, Zookeeper, Map/Reduce, HBase

RackSpace
Technologies: Apache Cassandra and Hadoop

Riptano
Technologies: Apache Cassandra Committers and PMC Lead. Provide their own Cassandra distribution and services.

Maxpoint Interactive
Technologies: Hadoop, Cascading, HBase and Nutch

2010 August Meeting - 8/26

2010-08-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

The August Meeting will be held on the 26th of August at CoSpace Austin.

This month's meeting focus is on tooling and productivity around Big Data and we have two special presenters flying in specifically to present to our group.

Please RSVP HERE so I can properly cater for everyone. It is free and open to all.

Agenda

6:30 - 6:50 : Meet and Greet (Austin's Pizza, Quality Beer and Tacos)

6:50 - 7:00 : Introduction to Hadoop and Big Data (Steve Watt)

7:00 - 7:30 : "Business Intelligence and Open Source"

Will Gorman (VP Engineering - Pentaho) will be presenting on the the challenges and architecture of big data analytics including the integration of structured and non-structured data. The presentation will also include a demonstration of Pentaho Data Integration’s new capabilities for Hadoop.

7:30 - 8:00 : "Techniques, Solutions and Tooling for Map/Reduce"

Abe Taha (Karmasphere) will be presenting on the challenges of writing Map/Reduce applications for Hadoop and will discuss a variety of techniques, solutions and tooling to make the developer more productive.

Location

CoSpace is located at 911 West Anderson Lane, Austin, TX which is at the confluence of Anderson Lane, Lamar, and 183. They are in Suite 203, which is upstairs, right in the middle of the retail center. Parking is free and there is ample. In back, up front, or even in the covered parking at the East end of the center.

July Recap

2010-08-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

Great turnout ! We had close to 50 people. It was a great meeting of the minds and most folks stayed until almost 9pm. If you haven't made it over yet, you are missing out. All are welcome. We now have the two presentations on video. We should have a more professional setup for recording the sessions at the next meeting.

"Graph Processing with Pregel" - Zach Richardson

"Extractiv" - Shion Deysarkar

Slides from the Presentation

Extractiv

View more presentations from Steve Watt.

There was some interest in learning how to decompose algorithms into Map/Reduce. Take a look at Jimmy Lin's (free in electronic format) book - Data-Intensive Text Processing with Hadoop

Also, the videos of the sessions from the Hadoop Summit are now available and they contain quite a few presentations on Graph processing

Thank you to our awesome sponsor

See you all at the next one !

July Meeting

2010-06-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

Our July meeting will be on the 22nd of July at CoSpace

We'll be having a joint meeting with the Austin Semantic Web Users Group and the topics will cover areas where Big Data and the Semantic Web intersect. Its likely we'll have a slightly larger crowd for this event. Come along and hear about all the interesting work being done around Big Data and the Semantic Web in Austin !

Agenda

6 - 6:20 : Meet and Greet (Beer and Pizza time)

6:20 - 6:40 : Hadoop Summit, BigDataCamp and Semtech Report Back (Steve Watt and Juan Sequeda)

6:40 - 7:20 : "Graph Processing with Pregel"

Zach Richardson (Locus) - will be presenting on Pregel, the new Google Map/Reduce equivalent for Graph Processing.

7:20 - 8:00 : "Extractiv - Entity Extraction at scale"

Shion Deysarkar @shiondev (80legs, Extractiv) - will be demoing the long-awaited Extractiv public beta. This service is similar to OpenCalais in that it provides entity extraction over text, but differs dramatically in that it can use thousands more entity types across millions of web pages. Shion will also be providing some insight into the technology behind Extractiv, which can crunch through thousands of documents in minutes.

Location

June Meeting

2010-05-17T14:08:00.000-07:00

Our June Meeting will be held on the 1st of June from 6-8 pm at OtherInbox

Agenda

6 - 6:30 : Meet and Greet (Beer and Pizza time)

6:30 - 7:15 : "Map/Reduce and Pig over Cassandra"

Jeremy Hanna @jeromatron - Jeremy works at Rackspace as a Cassandra contributor and will be presenting and demonstrating how one can write Map/Reduce and Pig Jobs to run over the Cassandra data store. This is a new and extremely interesting feature in Cassandra.

7:15 - 8:00 : "Apache Pig - Overview and social network analysis scenario"

Jacob Perkins @TheDataChef - Jacob works at InfoChimps as a Data Chef, analyzing, slicing and dicing data sets into useful information. Jacob will provide an overview of how Pig works and the functions available, ending with an example of how to use it to do social network analysis.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

Location

OtherInbox [ Google Map ]

701 Brazos Street, Suite 801

Located in the business tower of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos

Thanks to OtherInbox for sponsoring the awesome down town location !

About Us

2010-05-03T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Austin Hadoop Users Group is focused on both Hadoop and Big Data Concerns in general. We actively solicit presentations from our community and seek to publicize and socialize the great work that Austin companies, engineers and students are undertaking in this space.

Join our Mailing List

Contact me directly - Steve Watt at wattsteve AT yahoo DOT com

April Follow Up

2010-05-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Thank you very much to Click Forensics for so graciously hosting us and Rackspace for sponsoring the event. As promised, here are the slides from the presenters.

Flip Kromer - "How Wukong makes Hadoop so easy a chimpanzee can use it"

Steve Watt - "Web Crawling in the Big Data Ecosystem"

Also, the Call For Presentations for the Hadoop Summit on June 29th in Santa Clara, CA has been extended to May 10th. This event is well worth your time.

Lastly, I'm on the hunt for a new location and sponsor for our next meeting. If your company is interested please contact me at swatt AT us DOT ibm DOT com.

April Meeting

2010-04-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

Our April Meeting will be on 4/29 from 6-8pm at Click Forensics

Agenda

6 - 6:30 : Meet and Greet (Beer and Pizza time)

6:30 - 7:15 : "Web Crawling in the Big Data Ecosystem"

Steve Watt of IBM will provide an overview of the players and patterns in the emerging Big Data Ecosystem and then discuss the Apache Nutch Web Crawler, where it fits into the Data Gathering patterns and conclude with a demo.

7:15 - 8:00 : "How Wukong makes Hadoop so easy a chimpanzee can use it"

Flip Kromer of InfoChimps will demonstrate Wukong (the ruby language framework for Hadoop streaming they've developed) and show how they use it to do terabyte-scale social network analysis.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

Location

Click Forensics Address: [ Google Map ]

4301 Westbank Dr.

Building A, Ste. 100

Austin, TX 78746

Thank you to Click Forensics for hosting the meeting.

Sponsor

This meeting is kindly sponsored by Rackspace.

March Follow-up

2010-03-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

The first meetup was a great success. We had thirty people arrive, the beer was flowing and so was the pizza. Stu Hood from Rackspace gave a great talk on the Apache Cassandra Project and Gino Bustelo followed that with the IBM BigSheets Project.

Stu's slides are available here

Information about BigSheets is available here

Also - The ChangeLog Show covers the Big Data NOSQL Smackdown at Opal Divine's on 6th, sponsored by RackSpace and InfoChimps. Definitely worth a listen. Check it out.

At present, I'm lining up the Speakers and location for our next meeting. Join our Mailing List to stay informed. I posted a few pics from the meeting below. Thanks to all who attended.

Inaugural meeting - March 18th

2010-02-02T07:27:00.000-08:00

We'll be kicking off the inaugural Austin Hadoop User Group on March the 18th. We have speakers lined up from IBM and Rackspace and will cover quite a wide variety of topics along with a few demos. This event will follow directly on the heels of the SXSW Interactive conference. Pizza, beer and soft drinks will be provided and its open to all.

The initial sentiment, based on discussions I've had with people interested in attending, is that the group will cover both Hadoop and Big Data concerns in general.

Agenda:

6:00 pm Meet and Greet (Pizza and Beer time)

6:30 pm Hadoop at Rackspace

Hadoop is great for analytical work on large datasets. However, the results of that work can often times be large in size. Cassandra, another Apache project, is great for storing those results. This talk will discuss Rackspace's use of Hadoop and Cassandra, and the integration between the two.

Stu Hood is a lead software developer at Rackspace, focusing on infrastructure and open source for the majority of his career. His work for Rackspace with Hadoop is detailed in the O'Reilly Hadoop book "Hadoop: The Definitive Guide."

7:00 pm BigSheets: Web Scale Analytics using Hadoop

The web is exploding with data and business professionals want to access that data to get better insights to their business. By building on top of the Hadoop infrastructure, Big Sheets provides the non-programmer the ability to derive new insights from their data via ad-hoc analytics on top of internal and external data at internet scale.

Gino Bustelo is a Software Engineer in the Emerging Technologies division of IBM Software Group and is the project lead for IBM BigSheets. Most recently, Gino has been working in the areas of Cloud Computing, AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Eclipse.

7:30 pm General Discussion, Go forward plan, Wrap Up

Location :

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

900 South Capital of Texas Highway

Las Cimas IV, Fifth Floor

Google Map

FROM DOWNTOWN

From I-35 South take Hwy 290 West. Exit at Capital of Texas Highway North (Loop 360) and continue north on Loop 360 for four miles to the traffic light at Las Cimas Parkway. Make a U-turn at the traffic light and proceed south on Loop 360 for approximately 1/8 mile to the entrance for Las Cimas IV.

Take MoPac (Loop 1) South to Capital of Texas Highway North (Loop 360). Continue north on Loop 360 for four miles to the traffic light at Las Cimas Parkway. Make a U-turn at the traffic light and proceed south on Loop 360 for approximately 1/8 mile to the entrance for Las Cimas IV.

Parking is available directly in front of the building. For covered parking, the adjacent parking garage is available at no charge. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is located on the fifth floor of Las Cimas IV.