Tonight, Eric and I will be presenting back-to-back talks at the AWS Michigan meetup (hosted by the Tech Brewery this time).  Eric will be detailing a large Matlab HPC experiment we ran this summer to optimize parameters for a trading strategy; this one is a great AWS case study, as we crunch 10B inputs with 6.2 teraflops on 1408 cores and 1TB of RAM for $200.

  I’ll be covering legal informatics on AWS, giving the first AWS Michigan talk on CloudSearch.  If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve got an idea where the talk is headed (#1, #2, #3).  However, I’ve tried to provide more structure, detail, and comparison in the talk than has made it onto the blog, so I would definitely recommend taking a look.  You’ll get a solr vs.  CloudSearch implementation comparison and code to take you from scratch to searching.  Here’s the high-level outline:

  1. Generalize information retrieval more than you’re used to.
  2. Build a basic case search engine with solr/EC2.
  3. Build a basic case search engine with CloudSearch.
  4. Understand the relative strengths of solr and CloudSearch.
  5. Discuss other legal services that CloudSearch can augment.

  I’ve also uploaded the talk to SlideShare, so you can read it here or download for your offline viewing pleasure.