Yhat Sciencebox

http://blog.yhathq.com/posts/yhat-sciencebox.html

by yiedyie • 12 years ago

47 14 12 years ago

blog.yhathq.com

aye• 12 years ago

Awesome! The "get an email when your job has finished" takes me back to the days of True BASIC on the Dartmouth time-sharing system.

ehurrell2• 12 years ago

Oh brilliant, I'd be interested to hear how this compares with Statwing, which seems to be going for the same market. Definitely a useful service.

cschmidt• 12 years ago

Statwing is trying to do nice visualizations and analysis in a web browser, without programming. This is more of a way to use R or python to do data analysis on a remote AWS machine. You still have to know what you're doing in R or python, but it makes the "remote" part easy.

ehurrell2• 12 years ago

I had thought Statwing set up the remote stuff and then automated a lot of tasks in-browser, but it doesn't seem to give the easy access this does. This is a lot more attractive!

aroch• 12 years ago

Every time I see one of these pop up I'm reminded that one of these days I'll need to get around to automating my data analysis and re-learning R :(

And perhaps updating the COBOL scripts from 1970-something that I inherited

rguldener2• 12 years ago

I think this is cool but for me personally it would be so much cooler if it was open-source. Sure I understand they want to make money with it but really this doesn't offer me enough more than my current setup that I would be willing to pay $0.05 - $1.40 per hour. That's up to $33 per day or $1041 per month, (quite) pricey for some background execution and rsync functionality.

My current setup is to use a workhorse server where I set up a samba share for my home folder (so I can edit scripts remotely from my notebook without the git-push-pull dance) and a remote iPython notebook. Both config files are write once and forget and I get 90% of their functionality built in (without the web GUI). Would love to learn about other people's setup though, I am sure mine can be improved.

darkxanthos• 12 years ago

well the range is really $36 - $1,041 per month. That seems reasonable depending upon what you need.

rguldener2• 12 years ago

True, but if you only need a small instance you can also just use your laptop to do the processing and do away with a remote machine altogether. You are right though $30 a month for a good management tool seems much more reasonable, too bad they tie the price to the server performance.

fyrabanks• 12 years ago

Assuming the upper end of that--for a lab with 10 researchers (forget the students, postdocs, etc. for a second), you could save maybe half the cost by hiring a single IT person to do this. Aside from their sb client, I don't see anything in this that can't be downloaded and installed (either from source or automagically from any of the freely available science-related R, Python, etc. repos).

Neat idea, I just find it difficult to justify a $1000/mo per-machine cost, especially in academia.

larrydag• 12 years ago

you would think a Github like model would work. If the project is open source then its free but if you want to deploy an enterprise-wide or private product then you would pay the server costs.

elliott34• 12 years ago

This pairs well with the recent AirBNB fraud detection article. Airbnb has a lot of people to construct a robust machine learning architecture. For small start ups trying to make a recommendation engine, why not do sciencebox+ yhat cloud/enterprise? Especially for data science people that are don't have great dev skills.

radikalus• 12 years ago

Two things: - GPU instance support would be really really helpful - Pricing of the higher perf tiers is a bit painful which changes the normal AWS $ optimization metrics pretty massively

Otherwise -- it's definitely something we'd consider using; I end up doing 99% of my work on my laptop because AWS setup fixed cost time is 30minutes plus every time.

evancasey• 12 years ago

Seems like a useful tool that would make doing data analysis on a remote machine much easier than with plain old AWS + anaconda.

However, the incremental improvement of renting an EC2 instance (even with 8 cores and 65gb) pales in comparison to using a distributed data processing approach with medium to large datasets. Any plans for supporting Hadoop/Spark + Amazon EMR in the future?

Yhat Sciencebox

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