[FIRM] Reminder: Talk on Friday

[Stefan Theussl]

Dear colleagues,

As already announced earlier there will be a talk of our guest,

John W. Emerson,
Assistant Professor of Statistics, 
Department of Statistics,
Yale University, USA

Friday this week, 26th of June.

Location: Besprechungszimmer des Institut fuer Informationswirtschaft
	  UZA2 Ebene 3
Begin: 13:00

John (Jay) Emerson will be speaking about the following topic:

Massive data, streaming, shared and distributed memory, and 
concurrent programming with bigmemory, ParallelR and 
NetWorkSpaces.

Abstract:

Multi-gigabyte data sets challenge and frustrate
R users even on well-equipped hardware. C/C++ and Fortran
programming can be helpful, but are cumbersome for
interactive data analysis and lack the flexibility
and power of R’s rich statistical programming
environment. The package bigmemory bridges this gap,
implementing massive matrices and supporting their basic
manipulation and exploration. It is ideal for problems
involving the analysis in R of manageable subsets of the
data, or when an analysis is conducted mostly in C++.
The data structures may be allocated to shared memory
with transparent read and write locking, allowing separate
processes on the same computer to share access to a single
copy of the data set. The data structures may also be
file-backed, allowing users to more easily manage and
analyze data sets larger than available RAM. These
features of bigmemory open the door for powerful and
memory-efficient parallel analyses (including, but not
limited to, use of REvolution Computing's ParallelR)
and data mining of massive data sets.

The talk will include material about ParallelR and
NetWorkSpaces, because these offerings from REvolution
Computing mesh nicely with bigmemory for more advanced
applications.  The talk will conclude by considering
the use of bigmemory with ParallelR and/or NetWorkspaces
for distributed memory across a cluster, and for data
streaming applications.

Best regards,
Stefan Theussl