[okfn-discuss] MachetEC2: Open Visualization / Big Data Toolkit on Amazon EC2

[Jonathan Gray]

Flip from infochimps is working on an Amazon AWS instance - and is
soliciting for suggestions as to what should be on it!

  http://forums.flowingdata.com/topic/machetec2-open-visualization-big-data-toolkit-on-amazon-ec2
  http://blog.infochimps.org/2009/01/28/hacking-through-the-amazon-with-a-shiny-new-machetec2/

Very interesting!

We've also been in touch with Deepak Singh of Amazon AWS about adding
more packages from CKAN to their collection of public data sets...

J.

---

Hi,
We're assembling MachetEC2, a free Amazon AWS EC2 instance that comes
out of the box with a full suite of data analysis and visualization
tools. (Obviously the compute time is on your dime, but the base
instance is there for you to grab, for free, and get to hackin')

What tools do you want to have in there? We're going to push this up
in the next few days -- look for an announcement on the infochimps
blog, and we'll reply here too. If you'd like to help, set up
something you find essential and tweet/email us to 'pull' from your
instance. (You'll have to use a credit card to get an instance, but
it's so cheap it'll only cost a buck or two; and once it's set up
we'll pull it onto our account where everyone can get it.) If there's
already something like this floating around, please let us know and
we'll work with them instead.

We'll initially post up some subset of:

* Ruby, Python, Erlang, R
* MySQL, PostgreSQL
* AllegroGraph, CouchDB
* Hadoop, Hive, Pig
* Cytoscape, Gruff
* Processing, Prefuse/Flare, Modest Maps
* NLTK, SciPy
...
* YOUR SUGGESTION HERE

This will fit in with the things we're helping to add to the AWS
Public Data Sets. We want you to be able to use infochimps to find
something or pull down the Public Data Set of your choice; to load
that dataset next to your MachetEC2 instance clone, and be whailing on
data from go.

At some later point we can specialize (MachetEC2-viz, MachetEC2-ML for
machine learning folks, MachetEC2-ling for linguistics, etc), so feel
free to suggest things of (somewhat) narrow focus, and even more free
as I said to set it up and ping us. Free/Open software only, of cours.