News

New Intel Big Data Platform Includes Analytics Toolkit for Developers

• By David Ramel
• February 21, 2014

Intel Corp. last week announced a new platform that seeks to simplify Big Data analytics while improving upon the capabilities of straight Apache Hadoop. Following a general industry trend, the new capabilities of the Intel Data Platform include processing of streaming data and more interactive and iterative data analysis.

For developers, an accompanying Analytics Toolkit "provides a foundation of common algorithms, such as graphs and network-based clustering, that IT teams can build on and customize with domain-specific code," the company said. The algorithms can be used across multiple vertical industries such as financial services, health care and retail.

"The toolkit will also provide an enhanced development framework for unifying graph analytics and classical machine learning to ease the programming effort," Intel said. Along with the graph analytics and a predictive modeling environment, the toolkit is designed to uncover meaningful hidden relationships within data.

The Intel Data Platform open source software suite is based on the company's own Hadoop distribution, which is claims to provide up to a 30x performance boost over straight Hadoop via optimizations for Intel hardware.

An addition to that hardware portfolio -- the Xeon Processor E7 v2 family -- was announced this week by Intel, which said the new chips were designed to further improve real-time analysis of Big Data.

The Intel Data Platform, now in beta, is expected to ship next quarter in two editions. The enterprise edition will be free, targeting "customers who can self-support their deployment with assistance from the open source community." A premium edition includes a subscription for advanced features and live technical support.