Users share billions of pieces of content daily on Facebook, and it’s the data infrastructure team's job to analyze that data so we can present it to those users and their friends in the quickest and most relevant manner. This requires a lot of infrastructure and supporting data, so much so that we need to move that data periodically to ever larger data centers. Just last month, the data infrastructure team ...

Facebook engineers have tested a 64-core specialty chip from Tilera and found it more efficient for grabbing data quickly from key value stores. This test and others performed across the industry on alternatives to x86 chips may galvanize the creation of new benchmarks for the server industry as the debate of which architecture works best for webscale and cloud computing rages. The paper, issued Monday, and ...

New to the Open Source Conference this year is OSCON Data, for developers pioneering the evolving architectures and tools to manage data. See how Hadoop is used to optimize scalability and reliability at Yahoo. Find out how Facebook utilizes HBase to manage real-time messaging. Why Netflix moved from relational DBs to NoSQL cloud systems for personalized movie choosing. The in-depth sessions at OSCON Data, ...

The Cloud means different things to different people. Everyone has their own views of the Cloud and myriad usage patterns have evolved, even while new and innovative options are emerging everyday. The standard definition of Cloud computing, as quoted in Wikipedia: So in essence, the Cloud is an environment where all aspects of computing are availed of as a service and consumers, be they individuals or busin ...

Innovation around the management of large data sets is coming from the cloud, such as through MapReduce and Hadoop InfoWorld's own Pete Babb provided some good coverage around the "analytics cloud" recently debuted by IBM, called Blue Insight. You can think of Blue Insight as a system that gathers data from those who use it and externalizes the data to those who need it, doing so on a cloud -- a private clo ...

Scale breaks everything. Scale even breaks your assumptions about how best to store and query data. Scale does not care about your personal engineering preferences, or about SQL vs. NoSQL. The demands of rapid growth and ever-higher expectations for availability, performance, and cost efficiency force you to re-evaluate and re-imagine what you need, what is possible, and how to best achieve your business go ...

Apple has always sucked at the internet. With Ping and the new Apple TV, Apple sucks a little bit less at it. But Apple could be good at it. Apple's finally starting to reward people for buying into the Apple ecosystem, but everything they're doing is only a half-step toward what it could be, should be doing. It launched two social networks, and showed us how it's going to wirelessly connect iOS devices wit ...

We are in a Renaissance for computer science, engineering, and learning from data right now. The scale of data and computations is an important issue, but the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do with it. Now that there is so much data, it is time to unlock its value. Really neat things are happening already—like the way the people of the world can educa ...