Brute Force Information Retrieval Experiments using MapReduce

MIREX (MapReduce Information Retrieval Experiments) is a software library initially developed by the Database Group of the University of Twente for running large scale information retrieval experiments on clusters of machines. MIREX has been tested on web crawls of up to half a billion web pages, totalling about 12.5 TB of data uncompressed. MIREX shows that the execution of test queries by a brute force linear scan of pages, is a viable alternative to running the test queries on a search engine’s inverted index. MIREX is open source and available for others

Big Data: Astronomical or Genomical?

Genomics is a Big Data science and is going to get much bigger, very soon, but it is not known whether the needs of genomics will exceed other Big Data domains. Projecting to the year 2025, we compared genomics with three other major generators of Big Data: astronomy, YouTube, and Twitter. Our estimates show that genomics is a "four-headed beast"-it is either on par with or the most demanding of the domains analyzed here in terms of data acquisition, storage, distribution, and analysis. We discuss aspects of new technologies that will need to be developed to rise up and meet the computational challenges that genomics poses for the near future. Now is the time for concerted, community-wide planning for the "genomical" challenges of the next decade