The Wendelin FUI project

The Wendelin project has been granted on December 3rd, 2014. It has been selected at the Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir (PIA) that supports "cloud computing et Big Data". It gives visibility and fosters the French technological big data sector, and in particular the scikit-learn library, the NoSQL “NEO” et the decentralized “SlapOS” cloud, three open-source software supported by the Systematic pôle de compétitivité.

Scikit-learn is a worldwide reference library for machine learning. Gaël Varoquaux, Olivier Grisel and Alexandre Gramfort have been major players in the design of the library and Scikit-learn has then been supported by the growing scientific Python community. It is currently used by major internet companies as well as dynamic start-ups, including Google, Airbnb, Spotify, Evernote, AWeber, TinyClues; it wins more than half of the data science "Kaggle" competitions. Scikit-learn makes it possible to predict future outcomes given a training data, and thus to optimize company decisions. Almost 1 million euros will be invested to improve the algorithmic core of scikit-learn through the Wendelin project thanks to the Inria, ENS and Institut Mines Télécom teams. In particular, scikit-learn will be extended in order to ease online prediction and to include recent stochastic gradient algorithms.

NEO is the native NoSQL base of the Python language. It was initially designed by Nexedi and is currently used and embedded in the main software of company information systems. More than one million euros will be invested into NEO, so that scikit-learn can process within 10 years (out-of-core) data of 1 exabyte size.

Paris13 university and the Mines Télécom institute will extend the SlapOS distributed mesh cloud to deploy Wendelin in Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) mode, to achieve the interoperability between the Grid5000 and Teralab infrastructures and to extend the cloud toward smart sensor systems.