Microsoft’s latest news is going to hail a cheer from scientists who deal with large-scale data. On Monday, the first day of its 12th Annual Research Facility Summit held at Redmond, the software giant unveiled its new tool kit for scientists – ‘Daytona.’
Microsoft Research posts, “Daytona is the result of concerns raised by principal investigators from across the country, two years ago, at the U.S. National Science Foundation.”
Recalls Roger Barga, an architect in Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG), “All round the table people were saying -‘I need the means to analyze data’ or ‘I need a library of analytics that scale out over large data.’
Barga and his colleagues took note and designed a platform code-named ‘Daytona,’ designed to expand the tool set for scientists who require large-scale data computation.
Dan Reed, corporate vice president of the Technology Policy Group at Microsoft says, “Daytona gives scientists more ways to use the cloud without being tied to one computer or needing detailed knowledge of cloud computing, letting scientists be scientists.
“We’re very excited to empower the research community with this enhanced tool kit that will, hopefully, lead to greater scientific insights as a result of large-scale data-analytics capabilities,” he said.
Barga and his XCG colleagues worked on this project with only one goal in mind – to make it easier for scientists and researchers to explore burgeoning data sets effectively.
Having seen cloud-engagement program scientists and researchers struggling to extract insights from large data collections, Barga realized that they knew which algorithms to use but needed to scale out the algorithm to process data volumes in terabytes.
He explains that Daytona has a very simple, easy-to-use programming interface for developers to write machine-learning and data-analytics algorithms.
Daytona will help researchers and scientists to run algorithms over large scale data collections to extract insights, find patterns, clusters, outliers and build training models to classify incoming data based on the data they have captured and classified so far.
The tool kit is being distributed for free, and, to incorporate the latest advances and feedback from the scientific and research communities it is scheduled for monthly new releases.
Barga explains that Daytona has been rigorously tested and well documented. “We have code samples and programming guides – a full kit. People can now build on top of that.”
The success or otherwise for Dayton is scheduled to be measured in two ways. Feedback from two set of users – one from inside Microsoft and the other from the community – will be collected and responded to.
Daytona captured plenty of attention at the Faculty Summit, a three day event at the Microsoft Conference Center, in which more than 300 leading computer scientists, academics, educators and government officials consult with Microsoft researchers on challenges and trends in computing.
The theme of this year’s event was Future World, and, accordingly, attendees explored new advances in natural user interfaces, cloud computing, and machine learning.