Ambitious Data Science Can Be Painless

Understand

Modern data science research can involve massive computational experimentation; an ambitious PhD in computational fields may do experiments consuming several million CPU hours.

• Traditional computing practices, in which researchers use laptops or shared campus-resident resources, are inadequate for experiments at the massive scale and varied scope that we now see in data science.
• On the other hand, modern cloud computing promises seemingly unlimited computational resources that can be custom configured, and seems to offer a powerful new venue for ambitious data-driven science.
• Exploiting the cloud fully, the amount of work that could be completed in a fixed amount of time can expand by several orders of magnitude.