Data analytics application available for academic research

Datameer, Inc., a data analytics application that enables end users to discover insights and trends in any data, is enabling researchers to quickly analyze complex data sets to find and visually communicate their discoveries. Datameer now offers a free license of its data analytics application for qualifying academic research.

Academic researchers are particularly challenged by the massive amounts of data needed for their research. Collecting and analyzing data requires enormous computational effort and has typically been slow and tedious, often requiring a computer science background. Datameer offers an end-user focused tool that enables researchers themselves to integrate large quantities of data, do complex analysis in a familiar spreadsheet-like interface, and then visualize their results to easily understand, communicate and share their findings.

Datameer leverages the unlimited storage and compute capabilities of Apache Hadoop, a distributed computational platform that works on commodity hardware, to do the analysis in a faster, more economical way.

Dr. Douglas Grubb, of Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Halle, Germany, and Datameer set up an analysis that identifies functional RNA structures in the genomes of certain plants. Dr. Grubb's work demonstrated that biologists can use Datameer to perform analyses on a Hadoop cluster, which could then scale on demand, for instance, on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

"With the right big data analytics tools, the possibilities are really endless," said Dr. Grubb. "Datameer lets me focus on my research rather than complex data storage or analytics infrastructure. This will significantly increase the pace at which we can conduct meaningful scientific research."