Who’s Freaking Out? SGI Demo Shows Worldwide Twitter Heat Maps

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Over at Daily Mail, Damian Ghigliotty writes that SGI’s clever Big Data demo at SC12 used a supercomputer to visualize the worldwide Twitter trends as they happened. As a joint project with the University of Illinois, the demo shows a real-time Twitter heat map to track up-to-the-minute responses to major events. There are a half-billion “tweets” worldwide every day, so the demo tapped the power of SGI’s $30,000 UV 2000 ‘Big Brain’ supercomputer.

The project analyses every tweet to assign location (not just GPS-tagged tweets, but processing the text of the tweet itself), and tone values and then visualizes the conversation in a heat map infographic that combines and displays tweet location, intensity and tone,” said SGI’s Facebook page.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3AqdIDYG0c

SGI’s Franz Aman showed me how it worked at show, and I came away suitable impressed. Want to visualize the consciousness of the connected world in real time? Sounds like Big Data meets HPC to me. Read the Full Story.