Over the years, the database world has been continuously reshaping itself adapting to evolving needs and trends, moving from traditional row oriented tables into columnar models, graph stores and multidimensional array databases. The advent of Big Data challenged classic paradigms once more and drove innovative ways of dealing with ever-growing data, in-place processing and distributed parallelism, at the expense of increasing the algorithmic and operational complexities.

The inception of the HPCC Systems platform by LexisNexis over a decade ago, was the natural response to those challenges, as a programmable platform for large-scale data integration, warehousing and complex real-time delivery strategies. The flexibility of the HPCC Systems platform model and the high level programming abstraction that its ECL language offers, quickly enabled the development of most diverse capabilities, from Natural Language Processing to Machine Learning, graph processing and fuzzy linking, and eventually led to the release of the platform as an Open Source project in 2011.

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the HPCC Systems platform, its programming paradigm and capabilities, and will contrast it with Hadoop and other Big Data stores and non-traditional databases.

Dr. Flavio Villanustre

VP Technology Architecture & Product,
LexisNexis

Dr. Flavio Villanustre is the Vice President of Technology Architecture and Product for LexisNexis and leads HPCC Systems. In this position, Flavio is responsible for Information and Physical Security, overall infrastructure strategy and new product development.

Prior to 2001, Dr. Villanustre served in different companies in a variety of roles in infrastructure, information security and information technology. In addition, Dr. Villanustre has been involved with the open source community for over 15 years through multiple initiatives. Some of these include founding the first Linux User Group in Buenos Aires (BALUG) in 1994, releasing several pieces of software under different open source licenses, and evangelizing open source to different audiences through conferences, training and education.

Prior to his technology career, Dr. Villanustre was a neurosurgeon.