I am doing some experiments with clustering but now I want to visualize the data. Like in https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Visualizing+Sample+Clusters , is there a way to run the classes with arguments that accept custom cluster data ? What is the best way to see cluster data?
The command i am using is: mvn -q exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=org.apache.mahout.clustering.display.DisplayClustering
Thank you
PS: I am using Mahout 0.9
Any realistic data that is visualizable in 2 dimensions (and I don't think these classes can do much more than that) will easily fit into main memory. And if I'm not mistaken, these classes will load all the data into your memory, because they are only for demonstration.
Then you may as well use any non-Hadoop tool such as ELKI or WEKA or SciPy. Mahout really only pays off when you have more data than fits into your main memory. Otherwise, it will be a lot slower than a good single-host solution.
See e.g. this G+ post:
If your data is small enough to fit in main memory, don't run Hadoop.
Related
Is Hadoop a proper solution for jobs that are CPU intensive and need to process a small file of around 500 MB? I have read that Hadoop is aimed to process the so called Big Data, and I wonder how it performs with a small amount of data (but a CPU intensive workload).
I would mainly like to know if a better approach for this scenario exists or instead I should stick to Hadoop.
Hadoop is a distributed computing framework proposing a MapReduce engine. If you can express your parallelizable cpu intensive application with this paradigm (or any other supported by Hadoop modules), you may take advantage of Hadoop.
A classical example of Hadoop computations is the calculation of Pi, which doesn't need any input data. As you'll see here, yahoo managed to determine the two quadrillonth digit of pi thanks to Hadoop.
However, Hadoop is indeed specialized for Big Data in the sense that it was developped for this aim. For instance, you dispose of a file system designed to contain huge files. These huge files are chunked into a lot of blocks accross a large number of nodes. In order to ensure your data integrity, each block has to be replicated to other nodes.
To conclude, I'd say that if you already dispose of an Hadoop cluster, you may want to take advantage of it.
If that's not the case, and while I can't recommand anything since I have no idea what exactly is your need, I think you can find more light weights frameworks than Hadoop.
Well a lot of companies are moving to Spark, and I personally believe it's the future of parallel processing.
It sounds like what you want to do is use many CPUs possibly on many nodes. For this you should use a Scalable Language especially designed for this problem - in other words Scala. Using Scala with Spark is much much easier and much much faster than hadoop.
If you don't have access to a cluster, it can be an idea to use Spark anyway so that you can use it in future more easily. Or just use .par in Scala and that will paralellalize your code and use all the CPUs on your local machine.
Finally Hadoop is indeed intended for Big Data, whereas Spark is really just a very general MPP framework.
You have exactly the type of computing issue that we do for Data Normalization. This is a need for parallel processing on cheap hardware and software with ease of use instead of going through all the special programming for traditional parallel processing. Hadoop was born of hugely distributed data replication with relatively simple computations. Indeed, the test application still being distributed, WordCount, is numbingly simplistic. This is because the genesis of Hadoop was do handle the tremendous amount of data and concurrent processing for search, with the "Big Data" analytics movement added on afterwards to try to find a more general purpose business use case. Thus, Hadoop as described in its common form is not targeted to the use case you and we have. But, Hadoop does offer the key capabilities of cheap, easy, fast parallel processing of "Small Data" with custom and complicated programming logic.
In fact, we have tuned Hadoop to do just this. We have a special built hardware environment, PSIKLOPS, that is powerful for small cluster (1-10) nodes with enough power at low cost for run 4-20 parallel jobs. We will be showcasing this in a series of web casts by Inside Analysis titled Tech Lab in conjunction with Cloudera for the first series, coming in early Aug 2014. We see this capability as being a key enabler for people like you. PSIKLOPS is not required to use Hadoop in the manner we will showcase, but it is being configured to maximize ease of use to launch multiple concurrent containers of custom Java.
What are the disadvantages of mapreduce? There are lots of advantages of mapreduce. But I would like to know the disadvantages of mapreduce too.
I would rather ask when mapreduce is not a suitable choice? I don't think you would see any disadvantage if you are using it as intended. Having said that, there are certain cases where mapreduce is not a suitable choice :
Real-time processing.
It's not always very easy to implement each and everything as a MR program.
When your intermediate processes need to talk to each other(jobs run in isolation).
When your processing requires lot of data to be shuffled over the network.
When you need to handle streaming data. MR is best suited to batch process huge amounts of data which you already have with you.
When you can get the desired result with a standalone system. It's obviously less painful to configure and manage a standalone system as compared to a distributed system.
When you have OLTP needs. MR is not suitable for a large number of short on-line transactions.
There might be several other cases. But the important thing here is how well are you using it. For example, you can't expect a MR job to give you the result in a couple of ms. You can't count it as its disadvantage either. It's just that you are using it at the wrong place. And it holds true for any technology, IMHO. Long story short, think well before you act.
If you still want, you can take the above points as the disadvantages of mapreduce :)
HTH
Here are some usecases where MapReduce does not work very well.
When you need a response fast. e.g. say < few seconds (Use stream
processing, CEP etc instead)
Processing graphs
Complex algorithms e.g. some machine learning algorithms like SVM, and also see 13 drawfs
(The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley)
Iterations - when you need to process data again and again. e.g. KMeans - use Spark
When map phase generate too many keys. Thensorting takes for ever.
Joining two large data sets with complex conditions (equal case can
be handled via hashing etc)
Stateful operations - e.g. evaluate a state machine Cascading tasks
one after the other - using Hive, Big might help, but lot of overhead
rereading and parsing data.
You need to rethink/ rewrite trivial operations like Joins, Filter to achieve in map/reduce/Key/value patterns
MapReduce assumes that the job can be parallelized. But it may not be the case for all data processing jobs.
It is closely tied with Java, of course you have Pig and Hive for rescue but you lose flexibility.
First of all, it streams the map output, if it is possible to keep it in memory this will be more efficient. I originally deployed my algorithm using MPI but when I scaled up some nodes started swapping, that's why I made the transition.
The Namenode keeps track of the metadata of all files in your distributed file system. I am reading a hadoop book (Hadoop in action) and it mentioned that Yahoo estimated the metadata to be approximately 600 bytes per file. This implies if you have too many files your Namenode could experience problems.
If you do not want to use the streaming API you have to write your program in the java language. I for example did a translation from C++. This has some side effects, for example Java has a large string overhead compared to C. Since my software is all about strings this is some sort of drawback.
To be honest I really had to think hard to find disadvantages. The problems mapreduce solved for me were way bigger than the problems it introduced. This list is definitely not complete, just a few first remarks. Obviously you have to keep in mind that it is geared towards Big Data, and that's where it will perform at its best. There are plenty of other distribution frameworks out there with their own characteristics.
Does anybody know how I could transform the code found on the Mahout in Action book, regarding the recommendation engines, so that it is consistent with a Ηadoop fully-distributed environment? My main difficulty is to transform my code (that currently reads and writes from a local disk) so that it runs in a pseudo-distributed environment (such Cloudera). Is the solution to my problem as simple as this one, or I should expect something more complex than that?
A truly distributed computation is quite different than a non-distributed computation, even when computing the same result. The structure is not the same, and the infrastructure it uses is not the same.
If you are just asking how the pseudo-distributed solution works regarding local files: you would ignore the Hadoop input/output mechanism and write a Mapper that reads your input from somewhere on HDFS and copies to local disk.
If you are asking how you actually distribute the computation, then you would have to switch to use the (completely-different) distributed implementations in the project. These actually use Hadoop to split up the computation. The process above is a hack that just runs many non-distributed tasks within a Hadoop container. These implementations are however completely off-line.
If you mean that you want a real-time recommender like in the Mahout .cf.taste packages, but also want to actually use Hadoop's distributed computing power, then you need more than Mahout. It's either one or the other in Mahout; there is code that does one or the other but they are not related.
This is exactly what Myrrix is, by the way. I don't mind advertising it here since it sounds like exactly what you may be looking for. It's an evolution of the work I began in this Mahout code. Among other things, it's a 2-tier architecture that has the real-time elements of Taste but can also transparently offload the computation to a Hadoop cluster.
I know, Hadoop is not only alternative for semistructured data processing in general — I can do many things with plain tab-separated data and a bunch of unix tools (cut, grep, sed, ...) and hand-written python scripts. But sometimes I get really big amounts of data and processing time goes up to 20-30 minutes. It's unacceptable to me, because I want experiment with dataset dynamically, running some semi-ad-hoc queries and etc.
So, what amount of data do you consider enough to setting Hadoop cluster in terms of cost-results of this approach?
Without know exactly what you're doing, here are my suggestions:
If you want to run ad-hoc queries on the data, Hadoop is not the best way to go. Have you tried loading your data into a database and running queries on that?
If you want to experiment with using Hadoop without the cost of setting up a cluster, try using Amazon's Elastic MapReduce offering http://aws.amazon.com/elasticmapreduce/
I've personally seen people get pretty far using shell scripting for these kinds of tasks. Have you tried distributing your work over machines using SSH? GNU Parallel makes this pretty easy: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/
I think this issue has several aspects. The first one - what you can achieve with usual SQL technologies like MySQL/Oracle etc. If you can get solution with them - I think it will be better solution.
Should be also pointed out that hadoop processing of tabular data will be much slower then conventional DBMS. So I am getting to the second aspect - are you ready to build hadoop cluster with more then 4 machines? I think 4-6 machines is a bare minimum to feel some gains.
Third aspect is - are your ready to wait for data loading to the database - it can take time, but then queries will be fast. So if you makes a few queries for each dataset - it is in hadoop advantage.
Returning to the original question - I think that you need at least 100-200 GB of data so Hadoop processing will have some sense. 2 TB I think is a clear indication that hadoop might be a good choice.
I need some good references for using Hadoop for real-time systems like searching with little response time. I know hadoop has its overhead of hdfs, but whats the best way of doing this with hadoop.
You need to provide a lot more information about the goals and challenges of your system to get good advice. Perhaps Hadoop is not what you need, and you just require some distributed systems foo? (Oh and are you totally sure you require a distributed system? There's an awful lot you can do with a replicated database on top of a couple of large-memory machines).
Knowing nothing about your problem, I'll give you are few shot-in-the-dark attempts at answering.
Take a look at HBase, which provides a structured queriable datastore on top of HDFS, similar to Google's BigTable. http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/
It could be that you just need some help with managing replication and sharding of data. Check out Gizzard, a middleware to do just that: http://github.com/twitter/gizzard
Processing can always be done beforehand. If that means you materialize too much data, maybe something like Lucandra can help -- Lucene running on top of Cassandra as a backend? http://github.com/tjake/Lucandra
If you really really need to do serious processing at query time, the way to do that is to run dedicated processes that do the specific kinds of computations you need, and use something like Thrift to send requests for computation and receive results back. Optimize them to have all the needed data in-memory. The process that receives the query itself can then do nothing more than break the problem into pieces, send the pieces to compute nodes, and collect the results. This sounds like Hadoop, but is not because it's made for computation of specific problems with pre-loaded data rather than a generic computation model for arbitrary computing.
Hadoop is completely the wrong tool for this kind of requirement. It is explicitly optimised for large batch jobs that run for several minutes up to hours or even days.
FWIW, HDFS has nothing to do with the overhead. It's the fact that Hadoop jobs deploy a jar file onto every node, setup a working area, start each job running, pass information via files between stages of the computation, communicate progress and status with the job runner, etc., etc.
This query is old but it begs an answer. Even if there are millions of documents but are not changing in real-time like FAQ docs, Lucene + SOLR for distribution should pretty much suffice the need. Hathi Trust indexes billions of documents using the same combination.
It is a completely different problem if the index is changing in real time. Even Lucene will have problems dealing with updating its index and you have to look at real time search engines. There has been some attempt at reworking Lucene for real time and maybe it should work. You can also look at HSearch, a real time distributed search engine built on Hadoop and HBase, hosted at http://bizosyshsearch.sourceforge.net