Big Data Processing in the Cloud: a Hydra/Sufia Experience

Abstract

Presentation video available at https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p1txjdy74ts/ This presentation addresses the challenge of processing big data in a cloud-based data repository. Using the Hydra Project’s Hydra and Sufia ruby gems and working with the Hydra community, we created a special repository for the project, and set up background jobs. Our approach is to create the metadata with these jobs, which are distributed across multiple computing cores. This will allow us to scale our infrastructure out on an as-needed basis, and decouples automatic metadata creation from the response times seen by the user. While the metadata is not immediately available after ingestion, it does mean that the object is. By distributing the jobs, we can compute complex properties without impacting the repository server. Hydra and Sufia allowed us to get a head start by giving us a simple self deposit repository, complete with background jobs support via Redis and Resque.