[R-sig-hpc] release of Ensemble Cloud Army on SourceForge

[Jeff Howbert]

Greetings to the R-sig-hpc,

We would like to announce the first release of the Ensemble Cloud Army
(ECA) platform.  The purpose of ECA is to support parallel computation
of machine learning ensembles written in R, using Amazon cloud
clusters.

ECA is a fully open source project, hosted on SourceForge under the
Apache license.  You can try it out by downloading the Quick Start
Guide and zipped code/data/docs bundle from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ica/files/Releases/ECA_RMPI/.  The
Quick Start Guide outlines the steps for installing ECA on your local
computer, getting set up with Amazon Web Services, and running several
test examples.  When you’re ready to use it for your own computations, you
can consult the Users Manual for explanations of the architecture and
work flow in ECA, and how to modify the R scripts and configuration
files.

The current Quick Start Guide assumes a Windows local computer.  If
you need to install on a Linux local computer, and don’t want to deal
with the translation, let us know, and we’ll help.

The package has undergone limited beta testing outside our company, so
we hope it can very quickly be useful for real work.  We are happy to
answer any questions you have, and will be extremely grateful for any
feedback on bugs or awkward behavior.

The same code that’s in the bundle can be found as an SVN tree at
http://ica.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ica/.

We encourage anyone interested in parallel R computations in the
Amazon cloud to look closely at ECA, even if you’re not working with
machine learning ensembles.  The architecture for instantiating an
R-ready cloud cluster is quite general, and should be useful for any
parallel computation that relies on Rmpi for intra-cluster
communication.

For the time being, please direct all questions, feedback, and
discussion to the project’s Open Discussion forum:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ica/forums/forum/1114932/topic/3637053.
 We are actively monitoring that forum.  As traffic increases, we may
distribute some of it to more specific forums or the project Trackers.

Regards,

Jeff Howbert
Brian Pratt
Natalie Tasman

Insilicos LLC
www.insilicos.com