This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint proceedings of the Third and Fourth Workshop on Big Data Benchmarking. The third WBDB was held in Xi'an, China, in July 2013 and the Fourth WBDB was held in San José, CA, USA, in October, 2013. The 15 papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 presentations. They focus on big data benchmarks; applications and scenarios; tools, systems and surveys.

In recent years, there has been steady increase in the interest shown in both big data analytics and the use of information technology (IT) solutions to improve healthcare services. Despite the growing interest, there are limited materials, to addressing the needs and challenges posed by the activities and processes including the use of big data. From IT solutions’ perspectives, this book aims to advance the deployment and use of big data analytics to increase patients’ big data usefulness and improve healthcare service delivery. The book provides significant insights and useful guide on how to access and manage big data, in improving healthcare service delivery. The book contributes a fresh perspective, which primarily comes from the complementary use of analytics approach with actor-network theory (ANT), and other techniques, in advancing healthcare service delivery. Accessing and managing healthcare big data have always been a challenging exercise. Due to the sensitivity of the health sector, the focus on patients’ big data is from either technical or social perspective. Thus, the book employs sociotechnical theories, ANT and structuration theory (ST) as lenses to examine and explain the factors that enable and constrain the use of patients’ big data for health services. By doing so, the book brings a different dimension and advance health service delivery. Providing a timely and important contribution to this critical area, this book is a valuable, international resource for academics, postgraduate students and researchers in the areas of IT, big data analytics, data management and health informatics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking, TPSTC 2015, held in conjunction with the 40th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2015) in Kohala Coast, Hawaii, USA, in August/September 2015. The 8 papers presented together with 1 keynote, and 1 vision paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. Many buyers use TPC benchmark results as points of comparison when purchasing new computing systems. The information technology landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, challenging industry experts and researchers to develop innovative techniques for evaluation, measurement and characterization of complex systems. The TPC remains committed to developing new benchmark standards to keep pace, and one vehicle for achieving this objective is the sponsorship of the Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking (TPCTC).

This book constitutes the thoroughly revised selected papers of the 6th workshop on Big Data Benchmarks, Performance Optimization, and Emerging Hardware, BPOE 2015, held in Kohala Coast, HI, USA, in August/September 2015 as satellite event of VLDB 2015, the 41st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. The 8 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 10 submissions. The workshop focuses on architecture and system support for big data systems, aiming at bringing researchers and practitioners from data management, architecture, and systems research communities together to discuss the research issues at the intersection of these areas. This book also invites three papers from several industrial partners, including two papers describing tools used in system benchmarking and monitoring and one paper discussing principles and methodologies in existing big data benchmarks.

The objective of this book is to introduce the basic concepts of big data computing and then to describe the total solution of big data problems using HPCC, an open-source computing platform. The book comprises 15 chapters broken into three parts. The first part, Big Data Technologies, includes introductions to big data concepts and techniques; big data analytics; and visualization and learning techniques. The second part, LexisNexis Risk Solution to Big Data, focuses on specific technologies and techniques developed at LexisNexis to solve critical problems that use big data analytics. It covers the open source High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC Systems®) platform and its architecture, as well as parallel data languages ECL and KEL, developed to effectively solve big data problems. The third part, Big Data Applications, describes various data intensive applications solved on HPCC Systems. It includes applications such as cyber security, social network analytics including fraud, Ebola spread modeling using big data analytics, unsupervised learning, and image classification. The book is intended for a wide variety of people including researchers, scientists, programmers, engineers, designers, developers, educators, and students. This book can also be beneficial for business managers, entrepreneurs, and investors.

An in-depth overview of an emerging field that brings together high-performance computing, big data processing, and deep lLearning. Over the last decade, the exponential explosion of data known as big data has changed the way we understand and harness the power of data. The emerging field of high-performance big data computing, which brings together high-performance computing (HPC), big data processing, and deep learning, aims to meet the challenges posed by large-scale data processing. This book offers an in-depth overview of high-performance big data computing and the associated technical issues, approaches, and solutions. The book covers basic concepts and necessary background knowledge, including data processing frameworks, storage systems, and hardware capabilities; offers a detailed discussion of technical issues in accelerating big data computing in terms of computation, communication, memory and storage, codesign, workload characterization and benchmarking, and system deployment and management; and surveys benchmarks and workloads for evaluating big data middleware systems. It presents a detailed discussion of big data computing systems and applications with high-performance networking, computing, and storage technologies, including state-of-the-art designs for data processing and storage systems. Finally, the book considers some advanced research topics in high-performance big data computing, including designing high-performance deep learning over big data (DLoBD) stacks and HPC cloud technologies.

This book provides an overview of the resources and research projects that are bringing Big Data and High Performance Computing (HPC) on converging tracks. It demystifies Big Data and HPC for the reader by covering the primary resources, middleware, applications, and tools that enable the usage of HPC platforms for Big Data management and processing.Through interesting use-cases from traditional and non-traditional HPC domains, the book highlights the most critical challenges related to Big Data processing and management, and shows ways to mitigate them using HPC resources. Unlike most books on Big Data, it covers a variety of alternatives to Hadoop, and explains the differences between HPC platforms and Hadoop.Written by professionals and researchers in a range of departments and fields, this book is designed for anyone studying Big Data and its future directions. Those studying HPC will also find the content valuable.