Data

Data: How to surf, rather than drown!

Data on Disk

BCp2$ wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/testing/linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz
BCp2$ time cp linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz.copy

real	0m3.530s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.068s

BCp2$ tar --use-compress-program=xz -xf linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz
BCp2$ time cp -r linux-3.10-rc7 linux-3.10-rc7.copy

real	18m17.102s
user	0m0.214s
sys	0m6.359s

These timings were taken at ~10:45 on the 25 Jun 2013. Your mileage may vary!

desktop$ wget https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/testing/linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz
desktop$ time cp linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz.copy

real	0m0.192s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.156s

desktop$ tar --use-compress-program=xz -xf linux-3.10-rc7.tar.xz
desktop$ time cp -r linux-3.10-rc7 linux-3.10-rc7.copy

real	0m25.961s
user	0m0.168s
sys	0m2.360s

Again, your mileage may vary.

But hang on, I thought BlueCrystal was meant to be "super"?!

System	Clients x1	Clients x4	Clients x8
Desktop	~65MB/s	~10MB/s	~0.5MB/s
Parallel FS	~160MB/s	130MB/s	67MB/s

Data over the Network

Filling the pipe.

• 

  We can think of networks as pipelines for data.

• 

  Unless we fill the pipeline we won't achieve it's throughput capacity.

Data when Writing your own Code

Memory Hierarchy

L1 Cache	Picking up a book off your desk (~3s)
L2 Cache	Getting up and getting a book off a shelf (~15s)
Main Memory	Walking down the corridor to another room (several minutes)
Disk	Walking the coastline of Britain (about a year)

Data Analytics

Some common operations you may want to perform on your data:

• Cleaning
• Filtering
• Calculating summary statics (means, medians, variances)
• Creating plots & graphics
• Tests of statistical significance
• Sorting and searching

Selecting the right tools.

Databases

GUI. Accessing from a program or script. Enterprise Grade The data haven.

Numerical Packages

Such as R, MATLAB & Python.

Rolling Your Own

Principles: Sort & binary search.

Tools: Languages, libraries and packages.

When Data gets Big

Quotas.

Local Disks.

Swapping.

Data the Google way - Map-Reduce.

Hadoop & Friends.

Summary

• Use large files whenever possible.
• Disks are poor at servicing a large number of seek requests.
• Check that you're making best use of a computer's memory hierarchy, i.e.:
  • Think about locality of reference.
  • Go to main memory as infrequently as possible.
  • Go to disk as infrequently as possible as possible.
• Check that your are still using the right tools if your data grows.