Apache Mahout is a project of the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the A ...

to produce

free Free may refer to: Concept * Freedom, having the ability to do something, without having to obey anyone/anything * Freethought, a position that beliefs should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism * Emancipate, to procur ...

implementations of

distributed Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations *Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a varia ...

or otherwise

scalable Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

algorithms focused primarily on

linear algebra Linear algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning linear equations such as: :a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n=b, linear maps such as: :(x_1, \ldots, x_n) \mapsto a_1x_1+\cdots +a_nx_n, and their representations in vector spaces and through matrices. ...

. In the past, many of the implementations use the

Apache Hadoop Apache Hadoop () is a collection of open-source software utilities that facilitates using a network of many computers to solve problems involving massive amounts of data and computation. It provides a software framework for distributed storage ...

platform, however today it is primarily focused on

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Californi ...

. Mahout also provides Java/Scala libraries for common math operations (focused on linear algebra and statistics) and primitive Java collections. Mahout is a work in progress; a number of algorithms have been implemented.

Features

Samsara

Apache Mahout-Samsara refers to a Scala domain specific language (DSL) that allows users to use R-Like syntax as opposed to traditional Scala-like syntax. This allows user to express algorithms concisely and clearly. val G = B %*% B.t - C - C.t + (ksi dot ksi) * (s_q cross s_q)

Backend Agnostic

Apache Mahout's code abstracts the domain specific language from the engine where the code is run. While active development is done with the Apache Spark engine, users are free to implement any engine they choose- and Apache Flink have been implemented in the past and examples exist in the code base.

GPU/CPU accelerators

The JVM has notoriously slow computation. To improve speed, “native solvers” were added which move in-core, and by extension, distributed BLAS operations out of the JVM, offloading to off-heap or GPU memory for processing via multiple CPUs and/or CPU cores, or GPUs when built against the ViennaCL library. . ViennaCL is a highly optimized C++ library with BLAS operations implemented in OpenMP, and OpenCL. As of release 14.1, the OpenMP build considered to be stable, leaving the OpenCL build is still in its experimental POC phase.

Recommenders

Apache Mahout features implementations of Alternating Least Squares, Co-Occurrence, and Correlated Co-Occurrence, a unique-to-Mahout recommender algorithm that extends co-occurrence to be used on multiple dimensions of data.

History

Transition from Map Reduce to Apache Spark

While Mahout's core algorithms for clustering, classification and batch based collaborative filtering were implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm, it did not restrict contributions to Hadoop-based implementations. Contributions that run on a single node or on a non-Hadoop cluster were also welcomed. For example, the 'Taste' collaborative-filtering recommender component of Mahout was originally a separate project and can run stand-alone without Hadoop. Starting with the release 0.10.0, the project shifted its focus to building a backend-independent programming environment, code named "Samsara". The environment consists of an algebraic backend-independent optimizer and an algebraic Scala DSL unifying in-memory and distributed algebraic operators. Supported algebraic platforms are

, , and

Apache Flink Apache Flink is an open-source, unified stream-processing and batch-processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The core of Apache Flink is a distributed streaming data-flow engine written in Java and Scala. Flink exec ...

. Support for

MapReduce MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating big data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. A MapReduce program is composed of a ''map'' procedure, which performs filtering ...

algorithms started being gradually phased out in 2014.

Release History

Developers

Apache Mahout is developed by a community. The project is managed by a group called the "Project Management Committee" (PMC). The current PMC is Andrew Musselman, Andrew Palumbo, Drew Farris, Isabel Drost-Fromm, Jake Mannix, Pat Ferrel, Paritosh Ranjan, Trevor Grant, Robin Anil, Sebastian Schelter, Stevo Slavić.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Mahout Apache Software Foundation projects Hadoop Data mining and machine learning software Big data products 2009 software