SCIENCE

LexisNexis Risk Solutions announced that it has released the first set of binary code of HPCC Systems Community Edition. HPCC Systems is an enterprise-proven, open source solution to help large organizations process big data. HPCC Systems is built on high performing computer cluster technology and is an alternative to Hadoop.

To manage, sort, link, and analyze billions of records within seconds, LexisNexis developed a data intensive supercomputer that has been proven for the past ten years with customers who need to process large volumes of data. LexisNexis open sourced this supercomputer and launched it into the market as HPCC Systems, under a dual model offering a Community Edition, with free support, and an Enterprise Edition under a subscription.

"We are pleased to offer the Community Edition binary code for the CentOS operating system"said Armando Escalante, head of HPCC Systems, and Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of LexisNexis Risk Solutions. "We made this strategic decision to open source our data-intensive supercomputer to leverage the innovation of the community, and we are pleased to be on track to roll out our offerings"

The HPCC Systems platform specializes in the analysis of structured and unstructured data for enterprise class organizations. HPCC Systems is comprised of a single architecture, a consistent data-centric programming language, and two processing platforms: the Thor Data Refinery Cluster and the Roxie Rapid Data Delivery Cluster. The Thor Data Refinery Cluster is responsible for ingesting vast amounts of data, transforming, linking and indexing that data, with parallel processing power spread across the nodes. The Roxie Rapid Data Delivery Cluster provides highly scalable, high-performance online query processing and data warehouse capabilities.

HPCC Systems is offered under a dual-license model: the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition, now available, is a free version of the HPCC platform that offers software developers and programmers community support and unrestricted access to Enterprise Control Language (ECL). ECL is a non-declarative and data-centric processing language optimized for large-scale data management and query processing.

Software developers can express complex queries and transformations with less programming time and fewer lines of code than other conventional programming languages. ECL specifications will be released under a Creative Commons license, which makes it easy for third parties to use, implement and contribute to the language. ECL and the HPCC Systems architecture allow users to overcome the inherent limitations of the Hadoop MapReduce key-value programming model.