Category: News

In many cases, scaling out (by launching additional instances) is the best way to bring additional CPU processing power and memory to bear on a problem, while also distributing network traffic across multiple NICs (Network Interface Controllers). Certain workloads, however, are better supported by scaling up with a more capacious instance. Examples of these workloads […]

The YRI Trio Public Data Set provides complete genome sequence data for three Yoruba individuals from Ibadan, Nigeria, which represent the first human genomes sequenced using Illuminas next generation Sequence-by-Synthesis technology. This data represents some of the first individual human genomes to be sequenced and peer-reviewed (the full story is here). This article contains full […]

Earlier today, Amazon’s Peter Sirota took the stage at Hadoop World and announced a number of new goodies for Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Here’s what he revealed to the crowd: Apache Hive Support Elastic MapReduce now suports Apache Hive. Hive builds on Hadoop to provide tools for data summarization, ad hoc querying, and analysis of large […]

Weighing in at a whopping 500 GB (388 GB of data and 112 GB of free space to allow for some in-place decompression), the Wikipedia XML data is our newest Public Data Set. This data set contains all of the Wikimedia wikis in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. We’ll be […]

The folks at Infochimps have just released the Daily Global Weather Public Data Set. This 20 GB data set incorporates daily weather measurements (temperature, dew point, wind speed, humidity, barometric pressure, and so forth) from over 9000 weather stations around the world. The data was originally collected as part of the Global Surface Summary of […]

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS, is now available as a Public Data Set. Weighing in at 180 GB, the SDSS is the most ambitious astronomical survey ever undertaken. The researchers have used a 2.5 meter, 120 megapixel telescope located in Apache Point, New Mexico to capture images of over one quarter of the […]

We just posted a new case study. Read it to learn more about how Livemocha uses Amazon SimpleDB to create an online language learning community for over 3 million users and 25 distinct languages. Their VP of Engineering estimates that they have saved over $10,000 per month by migrating to SimpleDB and also notes that […]

The Amazon Mechanical Turk team will be holding Meetups in Seattle and Mid-town New York in the next couple of weeks. Attendees will learn about new ways to use the Mechanical Turk’s global on-demand workforce, discover best practices for recruiting and managing a qualified worker group, and see how to break down complex projects into […]

McCann Erickson is using the Mechanical Turk to collect information about people’s favorite locations around the United States. They’d like you to be as specific as possible, about places that you have actually visited. They are looking for the places that other people don’t always know about. The secret local hangout, or the place you […]

The Amazon SimpleDB team just cranked out a bunch of new features for the Select function, bumped up the maximum size of a batch of Select results, and also deprecated the old Query functions and the non-SSL interface. All of this new functionality is available through the 2009-04-15 version of the SimpleDB WSDL file. You […]