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Kimberly Kelly

About Kimberly Kelly

Kimberly Kelly has been involved in entrepreneurial activities on the Internet since she was 8 years old when she created an organization raising over $2000.00 for charities. Since that time she has continued to immerse herself in technology for positive change. She writes at CTOvision.com for Crucial Point .

GridGain: In-Memory Hadoop—use it when speed matters.

GG-Logo-1It is always interesting when two hot technologies come together. The CA based software house, GridGain, has brought together In-Memory and Hadoop by offering a high-performance in-memory file system. It is even 100% compatible with HDFS. GridGain File System (GGFS) is a plug-and-play alternative to the disk-based Hadoop HDFS. Enabling up to 10x faster performance for IO and network intensive Hadoop MapReduce jobs running on 10s and 100s of computers in any Hadoop cluster.

 

Unlike any other file system, GGFS can work as either a standalone file system in Hadoop cluster or work in tandem with HDFS, providing a primary caching layer for the secondary HDFS. As a caching layer it provides highly configurable read-through and write-through behavior. In either case GGFS can be used as a drop-in alternative for, or an extension of, standard HDFS providing an instant performance boost.

Interestingly GridGain’s In-Memory Hadoop isn’t yet another proprietary Hadoop distribution, rather, it is a Hadoop accelerator that works with any choice of Hadoop distribution (including the highly reliable, 100% open source CDH from Cloudera). The architecture behind In-Memory Hadoop gives you the freedom to not only chose any Hadoop distribution but to also use any of the dozens of Hadoop-based tools that you currently utilize. Whether you use the standard tools such as HBase, Hive, Mahout, Oozie, Flume, Scoop, Pig, or any of the commercial BI, data visualization, or data analytics platforms – you can continue to use them without any change while enjoying an instant performance boost.

Another hot feature with In-Memory Hadoop is the GUI-based management and monitoring tool called Visor. It provides deep development and operational capabilities including an operations & telemetry dashboard, data grid and compute grid management, as well as GGFS monitoring and file management between HDFS, local and GGFS file systems.

If you want to read more or need faster Hadoop, see GridGain.com.

Related Reading:

Amazon rolls out High Memory Instances for in-memory databases

H2O: An in-memory product delivering the fastest possible analytics speeds

Microsoft Focuses Big Data Efforts on Hadoop

Starting at the Basics: What is Hadoop and what problems does it solve?

 

Foldable Screens by Samsung

SamsungSamsung is leading the charge in foldable screens, just like they have been doing for flexible and curved screens.

For a video of a foldable screen see here:

amoledfold-sg

 

I am sure, just like curved screens, the folding screen is just another step toward some technology advancement that will blow all of our minds. (Samsung recently released a new phone called the Samsung Round that features a curved screen.)

I am not that surprised that Samsung took this particular step forward in regards to screens. The CEO of Samsung presented a timeline for the next few years of Samsung’s display technologies. Based on that timeline we should start to see these foldable screens on the market within the next two years, or by the end of 2015. All things considered, we all  know that two years is a pretty long time in the technology world and many technological advancements could be made between then and now.

Foldable screens will be pretty useful. This technology could allow us to create phones and other devices that can fold and be put away into a pocket, without fear of breaking. Personally, I would really love to see a tablet with this type of folding screen. I can’t help but imagine a digital map that can be folded and put away for future use… But I guess that is just me wanting to have a working version of Harry Potter’s marauders map.

Starting at the Basics: What is Hadoop and what problems does it solve?

With this post I start with the basics on Hadoop, including its history.

The story starts with the early days of Google. Engineers needed to design new ways to store and process and retrieve data that would scale to very large sizes. The published two papers on their design in 2003, and the highly regarded community-focused Doug Cutting produced an open source version of the software called Hadoop.

Along with that open source project came many other related open source capabilities, and soon an entire big data framework was created. New methods of storing, processing and retrieving data were now available, free, from the Apache Software Foundation. And innovation continued as a firm called Cloudera stood up to continue to accelerate innovation into the open source project.

Hadoop is a single data platform infrastructure that is more simplified, efficient, and runs on affordable commodity hardware.

Hadoop is designed to handle the three V’s of Big Data: volume, variety, velocity. First lets look at volume, Hadoop is a distributed architecture that scales cost effectively. In other words, Hadoop was designed to scale out, and it is much more cost effective to grow the system. As you need more storage or computing capacity, all you need to do is add more nodes to the cluster. Second is variety, Hadoop allows you to store data in any format, be that structured or unstructured data. This means that you will not need to alter your data to fit any single schema before putting it into Hadoop. Next is velocity, with Hadoop you can load raw data into the system and then later define how you want to view it. Because of the flexibility of the system, you are able to avoid many network and processing bottlenecks associated with loading raw data. Since data is always changing, the flexibility of the system makes it much easier to integrate any changes.

Hadoop will allow you to process massive amounts of data very quickly. Hadoop is known as a distributing processing engine which leverages data locality. That means it was designed to execute transformations and processes where the data actually exists. Another benefit of value is from an analytics perspective, Hadoop allows you load raw data and then define the structure of the data at the time of query. This means that Hadoop is quick, flexible, and able to handle any type of analysis you want to conduct.

Organizations begin to utilize Hadoop when they need faster processing on large data sets, and often find they save the organization some money too. Large users of Hadoop include: Facebook, Amazon, Adobe, EBay, and LinkedIn. It is also in use throughout the financial sector and the US government. These organizations are a testament to what can be done at internet speed by utilizing big data to its fullest extent

Track the most disruptive technologies by diving into our categorized index:

Artificial Intelligence Companies – A fast overview of Artificial Intelligence companies we believe are poised to cause the most positive disruption in the enterprise.

Big Data Companies – Reference to the greatest, most disruptive Big Data companies in the tech ecosystem.

Business Intelligence Companies – We assess these to be the Business Intelligence Companies most impactful for delivering real decision advantage.

Cybersecurity Companies – We apply our deep expertise in cybersecurity to assessing the best across multiple categories including:

Cloud Computing Companies – We include both platform and software as a service providers, capturing only the most innovative and disruptive.

Collaborative Tool Companies – These are the firms that help humans connect to humans to create, manage and lead.

Infrastructure Companies – Critical enterprise foundations for business agility.

IoT Companies – Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things are here. How do you manage them?

Mobile Companies – Help manage, configure, secure and optimize these very powerful capabilities.

Robotics Companies – Including innovations in Robotic Process Automation, Drones, and industrial robotics.

Services Companies – We only track a few, the ones we really know well.

Tech Titans – These are the big players. We track the tech titans closely since their capabilities change continuously.

VC, PE and Finance Companies – Keeping an eye on the investors can give indications of coming developments.

You can also use our topical pages to get up to speed quickly on the current status of the major megatrends. See our pages on Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics, Internet of Things, Cybersecurity and Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

We also provide special pages focused on high interest topics, including Science Fiction, Entertainment, Cyber War, Tech Careers, Training and Education and Tech Tips.

Spoofing on the High Seas: Yacht GPS hacked without alarm

Astrium-Metop-B-Weather-satellite-728x483

A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently conducted an experiment on counterfeit GPS signals. During this experiment researchers used a custom built GPS spoofing device to send fake signals to a yacht, which in turn sent this giant 213-foot boat off course. And the worst part about this is that these counterfeit signals did not trigger any alarms!

When out at sea, a crew’s sense of the ship’s location is based completely off of GPS signals, and these signals are broadcasted from orbiting satellites. So during this experiment, a researcher was able to command a spoofing device to transmit faint fraudulent signals to the ship’s antennas. The researcher then increased the strength of the signals until they were stronger than the other satellite signals, thus gaining control of the ship’s navigation system. Because the takeover was stealthy and done slowly, no alarms were triggered. Once in control of the navigation, the researcher entered a 3-degree course change, which then caused the ship’s navigation system to report a slight drift. In reaction to the reported drift, the crew manually applied a course correction. Instead of correcting the course, the crew was actually steering off course, and onto the researcher’s intended fake route.

There are two main worries now, first is the fact that the GPS alarms were not triggered, and second is that this vulnerability might not be limited to just yachts. Users of any semi-autonomous vehicles, like airplanes, have come to trust their autopilot systems, and these systems could be at risk of being hacked from afar. There are some ways to prevent such attacks, like encrypting GPS signals. The US military encrypts their GPS codes differently than civilian GPS codes, resulting in less hackable GPS systems. Other options are to adjust algorithms that identify spoofing attempts or to strengthen GPS signals so that other signals won’t be able to overpower them.

Having a better understanding of how these GPS systems work is an easy way for everyday users to prevent these potential hacks. Solutions are in the mix, so the time for panic is NOT now. Though if you were planning on throwing out that old worn out paper map that you keep in the glove compartment, maybe now isn’t the opportune moment. Keep it around just incase, you never know when you will be without GPS connection.

To read more about the GPS Spoof, click here.

And see the video here:

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