21st Nov.' 17 - Headlines

Starting the Apache Hadoop 2.9.x series

Apache Hadoop 2.9.0 released with new improvements and bug fixes

As the first release in the Apache Hadoop 2.9.x line, Apache Hadoop 2.9.0 has been announced, with 30 new features and over 500 subtasks. The first release of Hadoop 2.9 comes with 407 improvements and 790 bug fixes including new fixed issues since the version 2.8.2. More details on all the features, subtasks and bug fixes can be found in the change log.

Bitcoin touches $8000

Bitcoin price hits record high, crosses $8000

Bitcoin prices have crossed $8000 for the first time, after a bit of drama last week where the cryptocurrency faced a record high and then a slump in wake of SegWit2x proposal. Experts cite potentially rising interest from institutional investors and the arrival of new products into the market for the new price surge. As per the latest news, bitcoin is trading solidly above $8,100.

Announcing Amazon EMR 5.10.0

Amazon EMR 5.10.0 released: support for Apache MXNet, GPU instance types P3 and P2, and Presto integration with the AWS Glue Data Catalog

Amazon EMR 5.10.0 has been released. The new version supports deep learning framework Apache MXNet (0.12.0). Furthermore, you can preinstall custom machine learning and deep learning libraries on an Amazon Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and create your Amazon EMR clusters with that AMI. Besides, Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 P3 and P2 instances, and EC2 compute-optimized GPU instances for deep learning and machine learning workloads. Also, you can now use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to store external table metadata for Presto instead of utilizing an on-cluster or self-managed Hive metastore. You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with release 5.10.0 by choosing release label “emr-5.10.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. For pricing information about P3 and P2 instances on Amazon EMR, please visit the Amazon EMR pricing page.

Google reduces GPU prices

Google Cloud Platform cuts the price of GPUs by up to 36 percent

Google has decided to cut the price of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs attached to its on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36 percent. In US regions, each K80 GPU attached to a VM is now priced at $0.45 per hour, while the newer and more powerful P100 machines will now cost $1.46 per hour. “As an added bonus, we’re also lowering the price of preemptible Local SSDs by almost 40 percent compared to on-demand Local SSDs. In the US this means $0.048 per GB-month,” Google announced.