PLEASANTON, CA — (Marketwired) — 09/26/13 — , a Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) company committed to providing big data solutions for real-time data discovery, today announced a new software release for the Urika big data analytics appliance that delivers easier and simplified integration with Business Intelligence (BI) and visualization tools, as well as several key performance and productivity optimizations.
“We have seen an explosion in front-end tools for data discovery, and YarcData-s mission is to be the server back-end for data discovery, similar to how MPP appliances were the server back-end for traditional business intelligence,” said Arvind Parthasarathi, President of YarcData. “With our new software release, the Urika appliance further accelerates the uncovering of valuable insight in disparate enterprise data by combining scalable performance and industry-standard interfaces with the existing analytic ecosystem. Urika also eliminates the need for extensive data preparation, modeling and knowing all of the questions to be asked upfront.”
One of the central promises of big data is the ability to discover new insights and unknown relationships in the data. This poses a fundamental challenge for many traditional analytics tools, since the discovery process demands the ability to ask questions in an ad hoc, iterative fashion, to add new data sources on the fly as required, and to do all of this without modeling the data beforehand.
“Urika enables us to deliver on our mandate to deliver big data analytics to our world class researcher base looking for breakthrough discoveries,” said Nick Nystrom, Director, Strategic Applications at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. “Researchers come to us seeking to discover unknown, hidden relationships in their data and they rely on Urika-s real-time response to their most complex queries on their largest datasets — allowing them to explore hundreds of hypotheses in the time previously taken to explore just one.”
With this new software release, Urika now integrates with a broad array of enterprise interfaces, including W3C industry standards SPARQL and RDF, JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity), JSON (Java Script Object Notation), and Apache Jena. Additionally, analysts and data scientists can now easily interact with Urika using a wide variety of current and emerging third-party visualization and BI tools including Centrifuge Visual Network Analytics, and TIBCO Spotfire. This allows enterprises to deliver powerful new discovery analytics capabilities to business users while retaining the familiar user experience of their existing front-end tools. YarcData has also formed partnerships with a variety of data discovery ecosystem providers, such as Cloudera, Centrifuge, and TIBCO to explore deeper integration and deliver a more seamless data discovery experience.
Targeted performance improvements in the SPARQL query engine now enable Urika to handle key operations on aggregate functions up to 400 times faster, further advancing Urika-s existing orders-of-magnitude performance advantage. In addition, a significant improvement in memory efficiency enables analysts to load even larger data sets and simultaneously run complex analytical queries to rapidly investigate multiple changing hypotheses.
In contrast with traditional analytics where questions are typically defined and fixed up front, data discovery is an iterative process of hypotheses validation. This means analysts need to track and build upon previous steps in their hypothesis creation. With this new release, the hypothesis validation monitor capability provides users with fine grained detail across the lifecycle of hypotheses and their validation results. Analysts can re-use queries, analyze performance and investigate query results to develop and expand an existing hypothesis or series of hypotheses in order to get to important insights faster.
Urika is a purpose-built big data appliance for real-time data discovery using graph analytics. The appliance helps automate the surfacing of unknown relationships and non-obvious patterns in diverse data sets without the need for pre-modeling, partitioning or knowing all the questions in advance. Urika includes graph-optimized hardware that provides up to 512 terabytes of global shared memory; massively-multithreaded graph processors supporting 128 threads/processor; highly scalable I/O with data ingest rates of up to 350 terabytes per hour; and an RDF/SPARQL database optimized for the underlying hardware. Data-center ready and standards based, Urika complements an existing data warehouse or Hadoop cluster and is easy to integrate with existing analytical and visualization tools.
YarcData, a Cray company, delivers a big data appliance for real-time data discovery, enabling enterprises to gain game-changing business insights by surfacing unknown relationships and non-obvious patterns. Adopters include the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the Mayo Clinic, Noblis, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, QinetiQ, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as leading government and intelligence organizations, financial services firms, life sciences companies, and telecommunications providers. YarcData is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and more information is at .
Global supercomputing leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) provides innovative systems and solutions enabling scientists and engineers in industry, academia and government to meet existing and future simulation and analytics challenges. Leveraging 40 years of experience in developing and servicing the world-s most advanced supercomputers, Cray offers a comprehensive portfolio of supercomputers and Big Data solutions delivering unrivaled performance, efficiency and scalability. Cray-s Adaptive Supercomputing vision is focused on delivering innovative next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, allowing customers to surpass today-s limitations and meeting the market-s continued demand for realized performance. Go to for more information.
Cray is a registered trademark of Cray Inc. in the United States and other countries, and YarcData and Urika are trademarks of Cray Inc. Other product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
YarcData Media:
Tamarie Johnson
TNT Communication
503/345-9257
Cray Investors:
Paul Hiemstra
206/701-2044
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