Accessing Big (Commercial) Data across a Global Research Infrastructure - Modelling Consumer Behaviour in China

(1) Business School (2) EPCCThe use of globally distributed computing systems and globally distributed data to understand and manage global organisations is a well-established vision. It can be found in patents awarded for electrical communications systems that are integrated with electro-mechanical computing devices as far back as 1927. Use of electrical communications to reproduce images goes back even further to the first fax patent awarded to Scottish inventor Alexander Bain in 1843, preceding Alexander Graham Bell's patent for the telephone by over 30 years. Like many other company assets, data has value, however it has two additional characteristics that establish tensions with a globally distributed vision: (i) its value cannot be assessed until after it has been analysed, and (ii) that analysis may prove to be of more value to a competitor than the company itself. This type of concern is not typical of the global scientific collaborations that have driven the development of global network infrastructure, a distinction Jim Gray of Microsoft highlighted by describing data exchanged in radio-astronomy collaborations as “completely worthless”, by which he meant that it had all the dimensionality and scale of the most complex problems in business or medicine, but none of the sensitivities that impede how and with whom you share that data, or what analyses you attempt. Since the Economic and Social Research Council defines social science as “the study of society and the manner in which people behave and influence the world around us” it is clear that the sensitivities of exposing commercial data on behaviour in global markets to globally distributed computational environments presents a major challenge for (Social) Data Scientists. This paper describes some of the challenges of building the first Global Computing Grid to connect collaborating sites in three continents and installing an embedded analytical facility within a Chinese commercial organisation that has enabled collaborative analysis of millions of consumers. We report how this access has provided new insights into consumer behaviour within China ranging from testing strategic models of economic development to exploring ‘digital exclusion’ and the impact of migration on technology adoption

BeatBox - HPC simulation environment for biophysically and anatomically realistic cardiac electrophysiology

The BeatBox simulation environment combines flexible script language user interface with the robust computational tools, in order to setup cardiac electrophysiology in-silico experiments without re-coding at low-level, so that cell excitation, tissue/anatomy models, stimulation protocols may be included into a BeatBox script, and simulation run either sequentially or in parallel (MPI) without re-compilation. BeatBox is a free software written in C language to be run on a Unix-based platform. It provides the whole spectrum of multi scale tissue modelling from 0-dimensional individual cell simulation, 1-dimensional fibre, 2-dimensional sheet and 3-dimensional slab of tissue, up to anatomically realistic whole heart simulations, with run time measurements including cardiac re-entry tip/filament tracing, ECG, local/global samples of any variables, etc. BeatBox solvers, cell, and tissue/anatomy models repositories are extended via robust and flexible interfaces, thus providing an open framework for new developments in the field. In this paper we give an overview of the BeatBox current state, together with a description of the main computational methods and MPI parallelisation approaches.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures, last version submitted to PLOS ON

Non-standard Abilities of PostgreSQL

Import 22/07/2015Cílem bakalářské práce je prozkoumat nadstandardní vlastnosti databázového systému PostgreSQL nad rámec standardu SQL, respektive konkurečních databázových systémů a následně pro ně najít situace, ve kterých se dají vhodně uplatnit. V práci jsou nejprve postupně vyčteny možnosti uživatelské rozšířitelnosti PostgreSQL databáze a následně vybrány, zdokumentovány a zdůvodněny právě ty, které jsou jen obtížně nahraditelné vlastnostmi standardu SQL. Další část práce se soustředí na postup vytvoření jednoho praktického uživatelského rozšíření datábaze. Tato část podrobně popisuje, co všechno bylo při implementaci tohoto rozšíření nutno provést. Závěrečná část práce se pak stručně zabývá srovnáním dvou konkurečních SŘBD z hlediska rozšířitelnosti.The goal of this bachelor thesis is to explore non-standard abilities of PostgreSQL database system beyond the SQL standard respectively beyond other competitive database systems and to find situations of practical applications for these non-standard abilities subsenquently. As first there are listed user-defined extensibility options of the PostgreSQL database and then there are picked those that are difficult to replace with abilities of SQL standard. Next part of the thesis is focused on process of creating one practical user-defined extension of the database system. This part in detail describes what was needed for the implementation of that user-defined extension. Final part then briefly compares PostgreSQL database with two other database managements systems from the point of extensibility.460 - Katedra informatikyvelmi dobř