Basis Technology – Human Language Technology Conference 2012 1

Clouds, Search or HLT The 'forecast'?

Benson Margulies Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

Basis Technology – Human Language Technology Conference 2012 2

Clouds, Search or HLT The 'forecast'?

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Meteorology - or - Why Clouds

•  Lie  on  the  grass  and  look  up  at  the  clouds  •  Everyone  sees  something  different  

•  Computerized  Clouds  are  no  different  •  Applica;ons  Always  Available  •  Data  Always  Available  •  Tools  for  Processing  Big  Data  

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Big Data and Clouds =~ Hadoop

•  It's  not  just  a  maFer  of  size  •  Hadoop  ...  

o  Takes  in  structured  data  sets  o  Op;mizes  stateless,  batch  processes  o  Moves  computa3on  to  data  

•  All  of  which  is  great  if  that's  what  you  have  •  The  world  is  more  complicated  than  that  

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What it Doesn't Do So Easily

•  On-­‐the-­‐fly  (non-­‐batch)  processing  •  Stateful,  non-­‐local,  processing  •  For  example,  consider  a  search  engine  

o  All  about  online:  a  document  arrives,  users  want  to  find  it.  

o  All  about  global  state:  relevancy  involves  global  data  across  the  whole  index.  

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More on Search-in-a-Cloud

•  Good  News:  'conven;onal'  technologies  scale  to  very  large  indices.  o  Solr  o  SolrCloud  o  Elas;c  Search  o  ...  

•  How?  Shards.  o  'hash'  to  split  docs  o  queries  go  everywhere  

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Search-in-a-Cloud less good news

•  Alterna;ves  are  s;ll:  o  Limited  o  Research  o  or  both  

•  Solandra  o  Scaling  via  Cassandra  o  'just  another  sharded  solu;on'  o  Just  the  thing  if  you  like  Cassandra  

•   or  Accumulo  o  So  far,  very  basic  inverted  index  o  beFer  things  coming  

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Other HLT tasks ...

•  'Extrac;on'  is  'straighZorward'  •  Text  comes  in,  en;;es  or  rela;onships  come  

out.  •  Results  end  up  in  graph  DB  or  bigtable  or  ...  •  Scale  via  Hadoop  or  whatever  •  The  Challenge  of  Mixing  and  Matching  •  But  ...  what  if  you  want  a  feedback  loop?  

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Interoperation

•  Lot's  of  focus  on  applica;ons  o  e.g.  Ozone  Widgets  

•  Not  so  much  on  backend  processes  • What  good  is  'data  everywhere'  if:  

o  you  can't  deploy  processing  to  exploit  it?  o  you  can't  fit  together  pieces  of  the  puzzle?  

•  A  stovepipe  in  a  cloud  is  s;ll........  •  A  stovepipe  

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Harder Unstructured Problems

•  Imagine  you  wanted  to  cluster  ...  •  New  items  show  up  •  Need  to  find  'best'  exis;ng  cluster  

o  It  could  be  'anywhere'  

•  Need  to  update  to  reflect  each  new  item  •  (If  you're  wondering  what  we're  clustering  ...)  

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Rosette Concrete Examples

•  Straight  Search  o  RoseFe  Solr  Plugins  work  all  the  same  o  SolrCloud  hashes/shards  o  RoseFe  runs  on  the  target  node  

•  Extrac;on  and  similar  processes  o  Same  story,  using  Update  Request  Processor  

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Rosette and Hadoop

•  Stateless  APIs  lead  to  simple  implementa;on  •  Non-­‐code  resources  lead  to  some  issues  •  Stateful  processes  (e.g.  RNI)  ...  back  to  Solr