STA /
BST 290
STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
THURSDAY, February 5th, 2009 at 4.10pm,
MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments: 3.30pm, MSB 4110 (Statistics
Lounge)
Speaker: Karim
Chine (Cloud Era Ltd,
Title: Statistical
computing in the cloud: towards a federative and collaborative platform
Abstract: We
propose to build on top of R - the highly popular statistical environment, an
open platform for computing and data analysis. Using a rich workbench within
the browser, the statistician can now work with an R server running at any
location as if it was local to his machine. The platform hides the complexity
of High Performance Computing or cloud computing Infrastructures and the
computational Resource is abstracted with a simple URL. The R server can be
running near the large files to be analyzed or within the database where the
terabytes of data to mine are stored, the R packages can extend the
computational capabilities of the server and the workbench's Plugins can
improve the user-experience and the productivity of the statistician: Biocep
provides the required tools to democratize Grid/Cloud Computing and to deal
with the data deluge.
The new Platform makes distributed computing
accessible to a larger number of Statisticians. Very easy-to-use functions
enable the control from within an R session of several R servers running
anywhere as additional workers or as a cluster to solve embarrassingly parallel
problems. The new platform widens the scope of the computational research
resources that can be easily shared. Besides the interoperable software
components, the R packages, the Statistician can share functions and algorithms
as Web Services or as nodes for workflow workbenches. An R server can also be
shared: Statistician and collaborators can connect their workbenches to the
same R and analyze shared data collaboratively via a set of broadcasted and
high interaction views.
The seminar will give an overview of the new
platform. Biocep's deployments on Amazon EC2 and on The British National Grid
Service will be demonstrated.
