

Simulation of the world's universities in a single unified graph - okram
http://thinkaurelius.com/2013/05/13/educating-the-planet-with-pearson/

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emp_zealoth
I will probably get down voted for this, but when did a monopoly that makes
you pay ~80 £ (if i remember correctly) for an obligatory book is a good guy
now?

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okram
Ha. The world works in mysterious ways -- and organizations are large with
many heads. The ideas I see emanating from the Pearson team that Aurelius
works with are along the lines of -- Why are there brick-and-mortar schools?
Why is education just a short period of your life? Why does a teacher only
teach < 100 students in one session? Why do tests still exist? Why can't
software be the "office hours" that helps struggling students get back on
track with the concepts at hand?

Many of the algorithms were are working with them go into the arena of
computationally supporting education.

"If you want to understand X, given your personal knowledge graph, you will
first need to understand Y."

"The graph is detecting that student A is struggling with X concept."

"Teacher, given the knowledge of your incoming students, you should focus more
on Y concept."

"Teacher, no tests needed, here is a ranking of all your students based on
their comprehension of the material."

... hopefully the 80£ (and 80 lbs) textbook will be a thing of the past.

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espeed
_A 121 billion edge graph is too large to fit within the confines of a single
machine. Fortunately, Titan/Cassandra is a distributed graph database able to
represent a graph across a multi-machine cluster. The Amazon EC2 cluster
utilized for the simulation was composed of 16 hi1.4xlarge machines...The 10
terabyte, 121 billion edge graph was loaded into the cluster in 1.48 days at a
rate of approximately 1.2 million edges a second with 0 failed transactions._

How many machines can you add so that Titan continues to scale linearly? And
have you run the benchmarks on Google Compute Engine to compare?

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okram
Note that the codebase used in this benchmark was just released -- Titan
0.3.1.

<https://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan/wiki/Downloads>

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qwerta
Amazing. What is the cost of renting such cluster?

~~~
okram
I forget the exact cost, but it was, along with various dry runs at a smaller
scale, around $30k.

