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October 15, 2018

NEC and Hortonworks to Co-Develop High Performance Analytics Platform for Big Data

TOKYO, Oct. 15, 2018 —  NEC Corporation and Hortonworks, Inc. today announced plans for the co-development of a high performance Big Data analytics platform for AI integrating the “SX-Aurora TSUBASA” vector engine, a new hardware platform by NEC to accelerate computing using vectorization. This new platform, combined with NEC’s Big Data platform “Data Platform for Hadoop,” significantly improves processing performance and scalability to deliver better business results for Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics.

Prior to this co-development, NEC and Hortonworks announced an expansion of their strategic partnership in September, 2017 to deliver a Big Data processing platform. Utilizing their strengths, the two companies aim to offer new products suited for advanced and high performance Big Data analysis in a wider range of industries and fields. Moreover, the companies aim to provide the results of this co-development as open source software (OSS) that can be implemented in diverse environments and various industry use cases.

Co-development plans for the analytics platform include the following:

  • Integration of the SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform with “YARN”, the architectural center of Hadoop/Spark, a data processing engine which allows customers to run their existing Big Data analytics programs on the SX-Aurora TSUBASA. This enables easy integration of applications and reduces the workload for system administrators. In a standard system architecture using YARN, the server resources required to execute a typical analysis will be reduced by 99% when compared to existing systems.
  • The integration of NEC’s “Frovedis” middleware with Spark on the SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform. By utilizing Frovedis, AI (machine learning) applications run up to 100 times faster on the SX-Aurora TSUBASA than on conventional servers (*3). This results in a high performance and easy-to-use platform for customers to execute AI and Big Data analysis using the Spark machine learning library (MLlib).
  • Enhance the capabilities of NEC’s distributed processing platform, “Data Platform for Hadoop,” by integrating SX-Aurora TSUBASA, which allows customers to run Big Data & Analytics workloads much faster and to provide better, more accurate results.

“NEC is pleased to agree and collaborate with Hortonworks, a leading Hadoop distribution provider, to develop YARN and Spark support for the NEC vector engine, “SX-Aurora TSUBASA.” The prime objective of the collaboration will be to provide a high-speed, parallel process computing environment best suited for customers with large amounts of data that can be utilized for developing and building essential Machine Learning-based use cases. Adding support to the vector engine for Apache, Hadoop, YARN and Spark helps the customer to quickly achieve effective results from Big Data and AI use cases,” said Tomoyasu Nishimura, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation.

“An enormous amount of data is required to achieve high accuracy in Machine Learning. The combination of SX-Aurora TSUBASA’s high processing performance and Hortonworks HDP’s scalability will be an innovative choice in the global market,” said Yuji Hirokawa, Regional Vice President of Hortonworks, Inc. and Managing Director of Hortonworks Japan Co., Ltd.

About Hortonworks

Hortonworks is an industry-leading innovator that creates, distributes and supports enterprise-ready open data platforms and modern data applications that deliver actionable intelligence from all data: data-in-15motion and data-at-rest. Hortonworks is focused on driving innovation in open source communities such as Apache Hadoop, Apache NiFi and Apache Spark. Along with its 2,100+ partners, Hortonworks provides the expertise, training and services that allow customers to unlock transformational value for their organizations across any line of business.

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. The NEC Group globally provides “Solutions for Society” that promote the safety, security efficiency and fairness of society. Under the company’s corporate message of “Orchestrating a brighter world,” NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow. For more information, visit NEC at https://www.nec.com.


Source: NEC

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