Soaring the Clouds with Meandre

You may find the slide deck and the abstract for the presentation we delivered today at the “Data-Intensive Research: how should we improve our ability to use data” workshop in Edinburgh. Abstract This talk will focus a highly scalable data intensive infrastructure being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and will introduce current research efforts to tackle the challenges presented by big-data. Research efforts include exploring potential ways of integration between cloud computing concepts—such as Hadoop or Meandre—and traditional HPC technologies and assets....

Mar 15, 2010 · 2 min · 264 words · Xavier Llorà

Fast REST API prototyping with Crochet and Scala

I just finished committing the last changes to Crochet and tagged version 0.1.4vcli now publicly available on GitHub (http://github.com/xllora/Crochet). Also feel free to visit the issues page in case you run into question/problems/bugs. Motivation Crochet is a light weight web framework oriented to rapid prototyping of REST APIs. If you are looking for a Rails like framework written in Scala, please take a look at Lift at http://liftweb.net/ instead. Crochet targets quick prototyping of REST APIs relying on the flexibility of the Scala language....

Jan 21, 2010 · 2 min · 375 words · Xavier Llorà

GECCO 2010 Submission Deadline (Extended)

If you are planning to submit a paper for the 2010 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the deadline is January 13, 2010 (and now extended to January 27th). You can find more information at the GECCO 2010 calendar site.

Dec 19, 2009 · 1 min · 39 words · Xavier Llorà

Meandre is going Scala

After quite a bit of experimenting with different alternatives, Meandre is moving into Scala. Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. This is not a radical process, but a gradual one while I am starting to revisit the infrastructure for the next major release. Scala also generates code for the JVM making mix and match trivial. I started fuzzing around with Scala back when I started the development of Meandre during the summer of 2007, however I did fall back to Java since that was what most of the people in the group was comfortable with....

Dec 1, 2009 · 3 min · 594 words · Xavier Llorà

Scaling Genetic Algorithms using MapReduce

Below you may find the abstract to and the link to the technical report of the paper entitled “Scaling Genetic Algorithms using MapReduce” that will be presented at the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA) 2009 by Verma, A., Llorà, X., Campbell, R.H., Goldberg, D.E. next month. Abstract: Genetic algorithms(GAs) are increasingly being applied to large scale problems. The traditional MPI-based parallel GAs do not scale very well....

Oct 9, 2009 · 1 min · 159 words · Xavier Llorà