The General Systems Architecture (GSA)

The GSA is being prepared for release at the Lone Star Ruby Conference. A lot of exciting code is working behind the scenes, but there is more testing and development to finish first. That makes it very alpha, and very inviting for newcomers to get involved. The GSA does things like:

• Analyze large amounts of data on a parallel platform
• Model the dynamics of a system
• Introduce new ways of solving old problems from a community-driven catalog of algorithms
• Create an agent-based simulation
• Develop a non-monotonic reasoning system
• Walk the dog

OK, maybe not the last one, but you should see that this is meant to be general. It is a framework, written in Ruby, for developing answers to tough questions. In general terms, it can be seen as a generic code runner on a parallel platform. So, there's probably a lot of things that could be done on this system that haven't been thought up yet. Most of the applications will be things like machine learning and systems development.

Or, in more succinct terms, one might go the console and type:

          directive do
            function_is :predict
            method_is :ann
            target_is :percipitation
            data do
              name :weather_data
              filename '/tmp/weather.csv'
              reader :csv_with_header
            end
          end
        

and find out that there's a 95% chance of rain on the Oregon coast tomorrow. Maybe that's not a great feat, given that we're talking about Oregon, but the simplicity and flexibility of this framework is really what is impressive.

The GSA is a polyglot system: written mostly in Ruby, but also makes good use of existing libraries and tools, like R, GSL, Octave, FFTW, and others. It works on several types of clusters, including Hadoop and Rinda. It offers a strong Lab Book, for enforcing academic rigor to the research. It removes many seams from research and data exploration. Most importantly, it's pretty fun to use.

The GSA Hub

A website is just about finished that will serve:

• A community wiki
• Scheduling for pair programming (one-on-one training to get started with the GSA)
• A central repository of plugins, with their benchmarks
• other resources

Contact Me

Meanwhile, if you'd like to contact me, you can do so at david at this domain.