Tech Talk 22 - March 21st 2019

Guest Speakers and subjects:

Dr Vincent Freeh, Assistant Director of Undergraduate Programs & Associate Professor, North Carolina State University - Watch Recording
HPCC Systems as a Service (HaaS)
There are numerous reasons to use an IaaS for HPCC Systems instead of dedicated hardware, especially if the workload does not execute 24/7. AWS has developed several features and tools for launching clusters. CloudFormation provides users a tool to make creating and managing an AWS resources much easier. Foremost it consists of a template (CFT) that defines resources required. The template is parameterizable and flexible so that a single CFT can launch an HPCC Systems cluster with an arbitrary number of nodes, various amount of memory per node, and other configuration options. Second, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) contains the information needed to launch a compute node, with appropriate software, and configure it for a specific operation. We developed a CFT and an AMI for HPCC Systems and a reference architecture for HPCC Systems in AWS. Significant effort was expended to determine the best set of resources for HPCC Systems clusters. Furthermore, we created a program to create and manage HPCC Systems clusters in AWS from the command line. This talk will present the tools we created. It also explains and justifies the reference architecture and many of the configuration options.
Vincent W. Freeh is an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Arizona. His research focus is high-performance system software, with emphasis on file systems, parallel and distributed systems, power-aware computing, and storage systems. Prof Freeh teaches courses in the above research areas, as well as in compilers. He has more than 55 referred publications in numerous computer science conferences and scientific journals. He received an NSF CAREER Award and several IBM Faculty Development Awards. He was a captain in the US Army Corps of Engineers before entering graduate school for his MS.
David DeHilster - Consulting Software Engineer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group - Watch Recording
New ECL IDE features in HPCC Systems 7.0

The ECL IDE is an integrated development environment for ECL programmers to create, edit, and execute ECL code within the HPCC Systems platform. The latest 7.0 version includes new features and enhancements such as a more comprehensive autocomplete, tooltips and F12 capabilities. In this talk, David will discuss how users can leverage these features and more.

David de Hilster is a Consulting Software Engineer who has a B.S. degree in Mathematics and a M.A. in Linguistics from The Ohio State University. His background is in natural language processing and is one of the co-authors of the computer language NLP++including its IDE VisualText, and he has been a LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group employee since December of 2015. His top responsibility is the ECL IDE which he has been contributing to since 2016.
Bob Foreman, Senior Software Engineer, HPCC Systems, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group - Watch Recording
ECL Tip: A Tiny Trove of TABLE tidbits
This month’s ECL Tip of the Month will focus on the ECL TABLE Function. Common (and some not so common) use cases will be discussed. Code example demonstrated will also be available for download.
Bob Foreman has worked with the HPCC Systems technology platform and the ECL programming language for over 5 years, and has been a technical trainer for over 25 years. He is the developer and designer of the HPCC Systems Online Training Courses, and is the Senior Instructor for all classroom and Webex/Lync based training.