Summary
Managing big data projects at scale is a perennial problem, with a wide variety of solutions that have evolved over the past 20 years. One of the early entrants that predates Hadoop and has since been open sourced is the HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) system. Designed as a fully integrated platform to meet the needs of enterprise grade analytics it provides a solution for the full lifecycle of data at massive scale. In this episode Flavio Villanustre, VP of infrastructure and products at HPCC Systems, shares the history of the platform, how it is architected for scale and speed, and the unique solutions that it provides for enterprise grade data analytics. He also discusses the motivations for open sourcing the platform, the detailed workflow that it enables, and how you can try it for your own projects. This was an interesting view of how a well engineered product can survive massive evolutionary shifts in the industry while remaining relevant and useful.
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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Flavio Villanustre about the HPCC Systems project and his work at LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Interview
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data management?
Can you start by describing what the HPCC system is and the problems that you were facing at LexisNexis Risk Solutions which led to its creation?
What was the overall state of the data landscape at the time and what was the motivation for releasing it as open source?
Can you describe the high level architecture of the HPCC Systems platform and some of the ways that the design has changed over the years that it has been maintained?
Given how long the project has been in use, c
