Ambitious Data Science Can Be Painless

Modern data science research, at the cutting edge, can involve massive computational experimentation; an ambitious PhD in computational fields may conduct experiments consuming several million CPU hours. Traditional computing practices, in which researchers use laptops, PCs, or campus-resident resources with shared policies, are awkward or inadequate for experiments at the massive scale and varied scope that we now see in the most ambitious 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 raw experimental work that could be completed in a fixed amount of calendar time ought to expand by several orders of magnitude. Still, at the moment, starting a massive experiment using cloud resources from scratch is commonly perceived as cumbersome, problematic, and prone to rapid ‘researcher burnout.’New software stacks are emerging that render massive cloud-based experiments relatively painless, thereby allowing a proliferation of ambitious experiments for scientific discovery. Such stacks simplify experimentation by systematizing experiment definition, automating distribution and management of all tasks, and allowing easy harvesting of results and documentation. In this article, we discuss three such painless computing stacks. These include CodaLab, from Percy Liang’s lab in Stanford Computer Science; PyWren, developed by Eric Jonas in the RISELab at UC Berkeley; and the ElastiCluster-ClusterJob stack developed at David Donoho’s research lab in Stanford Statistics in collaboration with the University of Zurich.KeywordsAmbitious Data Science, Painless Computing Stacks, Cloud Computing, Experiment Management System, Massive Computational Experiments