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Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

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Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#71
post #66
post #45

Can someone add "join" to the language/standard please. Its awkward to have split but not join.

There's a "join" tool in the GNU coreutils. "man join"

Somehow, I hadn't known of the existence of the `join` utility until this moment. I really should devote some time to play around with it and paste, sort, awk, etc.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#72

What's the best pipeline/workflow management tool for command line programs with a GUI? E.g. for resuming the process after it gets interrupted etc.

Pipeline mgmt tool with a GUI, or tool for cli tools with a GUI? ;)

One very widely used option is Galaxy https://galaxyproject.org

You might also want to check out:

- Arvados https://arvados.org

- Chipster https://chipster.csc.fi

- Knime https://www.knime.com

They each have their strenghts and weaknesses.

I'd probably be going with Galaxy as the default option, unless you find specific reasons to go with some of the others.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#73

You can solve many, perhaps most terascale problems on a standard computer with big enough hard drives using the old memory efficient tools like sed, awk, tr, od, cut, sort & etc. A9's recommendation engine used to be a pile of shell scripts on log files that ran on someone's desktop...

AWK is such an amazing tool

I found this article to be really great for outlining all the capabilities of awk:

https://developer.ibm.com/tutorials/l-awk1/

From 2001.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#74
Very well written.

I think using 'make' with the -j parameter (# of parallel jobs) is more useful than using gnu 'parallel'. The reason is that if one of the job fails for some reason, you just re-run 'make' and only the required jobs are started instead of restarting the entire computation.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, as computers get faster and cheaper in every dimension what makes economic sense to use “Big Data” tooling and efforts gets substantially larger with it. The limits of single nodes 15 years ago were pretty serious but most problems businesses have even in the so-called enterprise can currently easily fit on a workstation costing maybe $5k and be crunched through in a couple hours or maybe minutes - a lot…

> The basics are missing by default Absolutely. I really want to see advanced AI/ML tools developed to address THIS problem. Don’t make me solve the data before I use ML, give me ML to fix my data! That’s hard though, because data chaos is unbounded and computers are still dumb. I think there’s still tons of room for improvement though.

I watched a talk by someone in the intelligence community space nearly 8 years ago talking about the data dirt that most companies and spy agencies are combing through and the kind of abstract research that will be necessary to turn that into something consumable by all the stuff that private sector seems to be selling and hyping. So I think the old guard big data folks collecting yottabytes of crap across the world and trying to make sense of it are well aware and may actually get to it sometime soon. My unsubstantiated fear is that we can’t attack the data quality problem with any form of scale because we need a massive revolution that won’t be funded by any VC or that nobody will try to tackle because it’s too hard / not sexy - government funding is super bad and brain drain is a serious problem. In academia, who the heck gets a doctorate for advancements in cleaning up arbitrary data to feed into ML models when pumping out some more model and hyperparameter incremental improvements will get you a better chance of getting your papers through or employment? I’m sure plenty of companies would love to pay decent money to clean up data with lower cost labor than to have their highly paid ML scientists clean it up, so I’m completely mystified what’s going on that we’re not seeing massive investments here across disciplines and sectors. Is it like the climate change political problem of computing?

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#76
post #67
post #26

Have used Mawk [1] in similar cases for a runtime savings, provided that the script works without any GNU Awk extensions. [1] https://invisible-island.net/mawk/

Thank you! For those that don't know, 15 years ago GNU awk was sometimes oddly REALLY slow. Mike's awk was not. Plus when things were overall slower back then, it mattered more. But there were bugs in mawk and it seemed basically unmaintained. So you'd run into something and have to use gawk or perl instead. That's no longer the case, the xterm guy adopted it, ten years ago, and now I know!

Last release was late 2017, but it has been very stable for me. Plus the author responds to bug reports.

Mawk is my go-to version because of speed. GNU Awk when its extensions are needed, or the task is over "small data" and the system default version is sufficient.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The basics are missing by default Absolutely. I really want to see advanced AI/ML tools developed to address THIS problem. Don’t make me solve the data before I use ML, give me ML to fix my data! That’s hard though, because data chaos is unbounded and computers are still dumb. I think there’s still tons of room for improvement though.

I watched a talk by someone in the intelligence community space nearly 8 years ago talking about the data dirt that most companies and spy agencies are combing through and the kind of abstract research that will be necessary to turn that into something consumable by all the stuff that private sector seems to be selling and hyping. So I think the old guard big data folks collecting yottabytes of crap across the world…

> In academia, who the heck gets a doctorate for advancements in cleaning up arbitrary data to feed into ML models

Well - Alex Ratner [stanford], for one: https://ajratner.github.io/

And several of Chris Re's other students have as well: https://cs.stanford.edu/~chrismre/

Trifacta is Joseph Hellerstein's [berkeley] startup for data wrangling: https://www.trifacta.com/

Sanjay Krishnan [berkeley]: http://sanjayk.io/

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#78
Unix pipelines, AWK, gnu parallel, R, all great stuff.

If you have such an specific task, why not just write an "actual program" (as opposed to pipeline of scripts)? From the looks of it, it sounds like this problem could have been solved with, say, 50 lines of Java, C, Go, etc, etc. Maybe a bit more verbose but it would give you full control, you wouldn't need to lookup how to use command line parameters on S/O, and would probably give you a bit more performance.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#79

You can solve many, perhaps most terascale problems on a standard computer with big enough hard drives using the old memory efficient tools like sed, awk, tr, od, cut, sort & etc. A9's recommendation engine used to be a pile of shell scripts on log files that ran on someone's desktop...

In the waning months of G+ I fired off a few bulk archives (front page only), not the full community post set of the top 100k or so Communities (size and recency criteria) using a one-liner of awk, xargs, curl, and the Internet Archive's Save Page Now USL (SPN: https:web.archive.org/save/$URL). That took a bit over an hour.

On a mid-1990s iMac running Debian, and a rusty residential DSL connection.

R played a role in other community-related analysis and reporting.

Re: Using AWK and R to parse 25TB

#80

Hi! Author of the post here. I can attempt to answer any questions if need be although it looks like others have done a great job doing that already!

Hello! I'm wondering if you came across our suite of libraries and tools for doing Genomics on Spark?

https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam

We've fallen off the first Google hit the past few years but are still quite relevant (e.g. Databricks' commercial offering uses ADAM under the hood). Drop in our Gitter some time!

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