Fly on the Wall – 2019 HPCC Systems Community Day Summit

Our 2019 annual Community Day Summit was held at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center in Atlanta, GA, USA on October 9^th. Thanks to our sponsors, Dell Technologies, Infosys, Datum Software and KForce Technology Staffing for supporting this event.

Community Day 2019, followed in the footsteps of previous years, providing yet another interesting showcase of the wide range of innovative uses our open source community finds for the HPCC Systems platform.

This year was particularly special because it marked the 20^th anniversary of the birth of our platform. It’s hard not to feel nostalgic about it, particularly for those of us who have been here from the start. We have proudly watched the platform evolve over the last 20 years, responding to changes in technology and the impact of the big data analytics explosion along the way.

Even before Community Day starts, there is a lot going on the day before.

Pre-Event Training Workshop
Data extraction, transformation and delivery cycle using HPCC Systems and ECL

The aim of this training workshop is to provide a focused event, allowing attendees to immerse themselves in some hands-on ECL learning with our training experts. Our 2019 workshop was packed with everything you need to know to understand HPCC Systems and build powerful queries using ECL.

Just look at this list of learning points:

• Introduction to HPCC Systems Architecture
• Data Extraction and Spraying to the Cluster
• Configuring the ECL IDE or VS-Code environment
• Introduction to the ECL Watch
• ECL Essentials and Syntax
• Defining RECORD and DATASET
• Repository Code Organization
• The Open Data Model of HPCC Systems
• Four Fundamental Data Definitions and Filtering
• Data Aggregation Functions
• TABLE Function and Cross-Tabulation Reports
• Data Duplication Processing: DEDUP and ROLLUP
• Data Cleansing using PROJECT
• Using the Standard Function Library
• Creating Custom ECL Functions
• Lookup Tables and JOIN
• Indexing a Dataset for ROXIE
• Writing and Publishing a ROXIE Query

While any one of these learning points are useful in their own right, the workshop is designed with the specific purpose of showing how to take a dataset, work through the ETL process and eventually produce a ROXIE query that allows you to search the dataset for results matching the search criteria.

Using the million song dataset, attendees learned how to clean and normalise the data, looking closely at:

• The data ingestion process
• Cleaning and slimming down of the dataset
• Building indexes
• Writing ROXIE queries

The end result was the Hybrid Search Song Service in ROXIE, renamed ‘Bobify’ by Bob Foreman, our senior ECL trainer, who always does a wonderful job of reinforcing good learning with side orders of fun and humour!

The ‘Bobify’ ROXIE service provides the means to search for a term and get relevant hits for matching artists, songs and similar artists. The following code shows the ECL code that was used for the HybridSearchSongService:

And here is a sample of the results for the term ‘Rock’:

A printed guide and thumbnail including data, code and documentation are supplied for post workshop review. Additional support is always available by posting in our Community Forums. We also have a full suite of ECL training courses including beginner courses for users new to the ECL language and advanced courses for those wanting to extend their knowledge and become an ECL power user.

As well as an immersive experience into the world of ECL, this event provides valuable networking opportunities with other ECL users attending our Community Day Summit the following day.

It’s also a great way to meet other HPCC Systems users who may have tips, tricks and use cases to share about the development of ongoing big data analytics-based project ideas, while also providing problem solving advice based on their experience of successfully working through similar issues.

Pre-Event Technical Poster Contest

Students arrive the day before Community Day to present about the poster they have entered into this contest. Each poster provides an illustrated guide of a project that a student has worked on during the year, which leverages HPCC Systems in some way. Posters are mostly based on projects completed by HPCC Systems interns or via our Academic Program collaborations. However, the contest is open to any student who has an HPCC Systems project to share regardless of their involvement in either of these programs.

Since we started to run this contest in 2016, 41 posters have been entered.

• Intern program entries: 19 different students. 4 interns have presented twice and one entered a poster on three consecutive years. Learn more about our 2019 interns and their projects.
• Academic Program collaborations: 14 different students, with 3 students entering the contest twice.
• 2019 Stats: 13 posters from 10 different academic institutions across 4 continents, including students from high school through to PhD and beyond.

8 Students presented their posters in person on the day:

Students presenting in person on the day, from the left: Vannel Zeufack, Alyssa Messner, Chris Connelly, Jack Fields, Huafu Hu,
Robert Kennedy, Yash Mishra and Farah Alshanik

This year, for the first time, we accepted posters from students located outside the USA. While these posters were displayed in the room on the day for the judges to see in person, the students presented live over Skype from 3 different continents, including Europe, India and South America.

^{Students presenting over Skype:
Top Row: Sathvik K R (India), Muiredach O’Riain (UK), Akshar Prasad (India)
Bottom Row: Elimar Rodrigues Da Macena and Andre Felipe Santos Martins (Brazil)}

The judges work their way around the room, listening to each student present with time for questions at the end. A scorecard is given to each judge to award marks out of five in three different categories (content, poster design and presentation) for each poster presenter.

There were 13 posters to judge this year. With each one taking between 5-7 minutes to judge, it takes a while to complete the judging process.

^{Meet the judges: Fabian Fier (Humboldt University, Berlin), Jim DeFabia, Sarah Fabius and Tony Kirk (LexisNexis Risk Solutions)}

While this is going on, delegates attending our Community Day event are arriving and registering outside. A number of academics always arrive early to support their students and wait patiently for judging to end and the opportunity to see the posters.

After the judges’ scorecards have been collected, we open the doors to host our Academic Meet and Greet event. The room at this point is buzzing with energy and the focus is all on the students and their work. It’s also an event that brings people together. One look around the room shines a spotlight on the productive, positive and collaborative focus of our Academic Program and all those involved.

At this point, we still do not know who the winners are. The judges’ scores will be counted behind closed doors later and the results will be announced during our Community Day award ceremony the following day.

2019 HPCC Systems Technical Poster Contest Winners

^{Our 2019 Technical Poster Contest Winners!
From the left Alyssa Mesner (2nd) Robert Kennedy (1st) and Vannel Zeufack (3rd)}

 1^st Place Winning Entry
Robert Kennedy
Florida Atlantic University
GPU Accelerated Neural Networks on HPCC Systems Platform
(View Poster / Read Extract)

 2^nd Place Winning Entry
Alyssa Messner
Wayne State University
Exploring Co-occurring Mental Illness and Substance Abuse Disorder Using HPCC Systems
(View Poster / Read Extract)

 3^rd Place Winning Entry
Vannel Zeufack
Kennesaw State University
Unsupervised Log-based Anomaly Detection
(View Poster / Read Extract)

This contest attracts posters of a very high standard that cover a wide range of topics, including the implementation of features and enhancements to the HPCC Systems Platform and Machine Learning Library as well as interesting use cases and research. These students have completed extremely worthwhile work in 2019 and I recommend taking some time to take a look at all the posters for yourself.

The posters were displayed throughout our 2019 Community Day Summit, providing an impressive showcase of their achievements. Congratulations to all our poster presenters for their hard work during 2019.

Learn more about our Technical Poster Contest:

• Fly on the Wall – Meet our 2019 Poster Presenters and Judges.
• Large scale images of each poster and abstracts are available on our 2019 Technical Poster Contest Wiki.

HPCC Systems Community Day Summit 2019

Community Day brings together colleagues, community users and our industry and academic partners. It all starts the evening before with a welcome reception and dinner.

In previous years, we have invited the high school robotics teams from American Heritage School and NSU University School to provide a demo of their robots, which are sponsored via our Academic Program and are very popular with our audience. This year was no exception. We extended this display providing an Interactive Expo including exhibits from our sponsors, meet the expert opportunities and displays of interesting use cases for HPCC Systems. All this whets the appetite for the day to come.

Community Day 2019 was packed to the rafters with a wealth of information and our chosen theme was Challenge Yourself – Challenge the Status Quo.

The day was split into 3 parts, starting and ending with a general session in the main conference room. In between, a choice of breakout sessions were available on rotation.

Our MC for the day was Trish McCall who manages the HPCC Systems Academic Program.

Our Academic Program has grown hugely over the years under Trish’s leadership. Professors and students representing a number of academic institutions attend and present at this event. Trish also supports our Industry Partners who were also represented on the day. Trish’s speaker introductions give interesting insights into these programs and the achievements of all those involved. I asked Trish for her reflections on the day and her role as MC:

‘What an honor to kick things off at the 6^th annual HPCC Systems Community Day. The agenda was action-packed with a fantastic line up of speakers, sessions and exhibits. It was great to see our community coming together to share their success stories and insights on how they leverage the HPCC Systems platform, while also giving attendees the opportunity to network and form new relationships.‘

General Session – Industry and Academia

The presentations in this session show how HPCC Systems continues to adapt to changing needs and priorities, while supporting a diverse range of use cases. Watch the presentations in this session:

• Opening Keynote: The Past 20 Years Watch Recording / View Slides
  Flavio Villanustre, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Join Flavio as he walks down memory lane, demonstrating just how innovative an idea HPCC Systems was in 1999. Listen to him track a number of developments that were firsts in the field such as, the first distributed in memory data retrieving system, the first implicitly parallel dataflow processing DSL language (ECL), the first distributed data integration system (Thor) and the first distributed hybrid query system (ROXIE).
• Leveraging HPCC Systems as Part of an Information Security, Privacy, and Compliance Framework Watch Recording / View Slides / Read Blog 
  Andy Bayer, Marcus Mullins and Naweed Mohammed, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  The choice to use HPCC Systems for this business case was made for many reasons including its simple but effective architecture and the fact that HPCC Systems is open source which facilitiates the low cost of development and maintenance. This project requires the checking of high volume and high velocity data for user fraud, creating any reports required as quickly as possible. The main goal is to ensure that products are being used in the right way by the right people for the right purpose.
• HPCC Systems Accelerating the Rapid Expansion of the China Big Data Market Watch Recording / View Slides
  Yun Chen, LexisNexis Risk Solutions 
  Yun talks about how different the Chinese market is focusing on the big data perspective. China’s growth has expanded significantly in recent decades with the prediction that it will outperform that of the US in the coming years. China is already number one in the world in many areas such as exports, car consumption, transportation networks and communication, including the largest number of internet users. Listen to Yun track the progress of HPCC Systems partnerships in China since 2013, while looking towards future opportunities.
• The Power of HPCC Systems – A Bio-tech Industry Practice Watch Recording / View Slides
  Meng Han, Kennesaw State University
  Hear Meng talk about how he uses HPCC Systems in his research lab which focuses on data driven intelligence and its applications. He has been working with Omega Bio-Tec Inc who provide a service for DNA testing, producing over 900 products, including a Microbiome Gut Profiling kit. Listen to Meng talk about the importance of probiotics in the human gut and how his lab has been using a data driven approach to find out how what goes on in our gut affects human health in many different ways. His current project involves looking at gut samples from children and analysing the probiotic bacteria present to help resolve their ongoing health issues.
• Using High Dimensional Representation of Words (CBOW) to Find Domain Based Common Words Watch Recording / View Slides / View Poster
  Farah Alshanik, Clemson University
  Farah joined the HPCC Systems intern program in 2019 for the second year running. Her presentation demonstrates the work she completed during her internship. Join her as she walks through the methodology she used, the application of her work and her plans for future work.
• Athlete 360: Leveraging HPCC Systems for Maximizing Player Performance Watch Recording / View Slides / View Poster
  Vincent Freeh and Chris Connelly,NC State University
  Chris Connelly joined the HPCC Systems intern program in 2019 to work on this project involving sports analytics. Chris used GPS data to monitor the performance of athletes with the aim of helping individuals manage and improve their sporting performance. Listen to Vincent and Chris explain the theory and methodology behind this work as they share the interesting insights from the data collected and their plans to extend this work in the future.
• Beyond the Spectrum – Creating an Environment of Diversity and Empowerment with HPCC Systems Watch Recording / View Slides
  Darius Murray, Florida Atlantic University Center for Autism and Related Disabilities
  Hear Darius speak about how the iRise2 project supports young people with autism and other related disabilities, who often find it very difficult to develop the skills they need to achieve well in the workplace. LexisNexis Risk Solutions sponsors this organisation via the HPCC Systems Academic Program, providing STEM opportunities for students to develop the skills they need.
• A Success Story of Challenging the Status Quo: Gadget Girls and the Inclusion of Women in STEM Teaching Watch Recording / View Slides
  Ronnie Shashoua, NSU University School
  Listen to this inspiring story told by a high schoool student who took her interest in robotics to the next level by starting her own robotics program for girls. Ronnie addresses the under representation of women in STEM related fields and is clearly passionate about wanting to be part of the solution to encourage more women to pursue STEM related careers. LexisNexis Risk Solution sponsors this program via the HPCC Systems Academic Program.
• Community Awards Ceremony Watch Recording / View Slides
  Trish McCall & Flavio Villanustre, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Awards were made to the winners of the 2019 Technical Poster Contest, the winner of the HPCC Systems Community Recognition Award and the winner of the HPCC Systems David Kan Ambassador Award.

Breakout Sessions

This year, our breakout sessions were organised around the themes of system enhancements, usability improvements, novel applications and cloud enablement.

Time constraints unfortunately mean that, on the day, choices have to be made about which breakout sessions to attend. We also know there are people who are not able to attend on the day.

However, the good news is that recordings of all our sessions including the breakouts are all available on catchup via our YouTube channel and the presenter slides are available on SlideShare. Watch the breakout presentations:

System Enhancements

• Workunit Analysis Tool Watch Recording / View Slides
  Shamser Ahmed, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  This new tool, which is built in to the ECL Watch user interface, was introduced into HPCC Systems 7.4.0. ECL developers have always carried out analysis on poorly performing workunits, but until now, this was a manual process. The Workunit Analysis Tool automates this process for a number of common causes saving ECL developers time. Shamser demonstrates this very effectively by showing what the manual analysis process looks like in comparison with how it is now possible to run the same analysis using the Workunit Analysis Tool.
• Leveraging the Spark-HPCC Ecosystem Watch Recording / View Slides /Read Blog
  James McMullan, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  At last year’s conference, James spoke about the Spark HPCC Systems connector. In this breakout session, he provides an update on new features added since and reviews the basics of reading and writing to and from HPCC Systems using Spark, with code examples. He also talks about how to use Apache Zeppelin as a front end for submitting jobs in Spark and demonstrates how to build a machine learning model using Random Forest as an example.

Usability Improvements

• Dapper Tool – A Bundle to Make your ECL Neater Watch Recording / View Slides / Read Blog
  Rob Mansfield, Proagrica
  Do you sometimes think ECL is a little verbose for your project needs? Rob developed his Dapper tool to make coding in ECL faster for developers and easier to read by turning verbose ECL call into simple verbs. His Jabba the Hutt’s Body Mass Index example provides a instructive and fun example. He also introduces a few other related tools his team has created to simplifiy their use of HPCC Systems, such as a polygon handling tool for ECL called Wally and a python package that builds on the ideas of Dapper called Hpycc.
• DataPatterns – Profiling in ECL Watch DataPatterns Watch Recording / View Slides
  Dan Camper, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Last year, Dan spoke about the DataPatterns Bundle which was a new addition to the HPCC Systems platform. Since then, this data profiling tool has been integrated into the ECL Standard Library to make the features much easier to use. Learn what DataPatterns can do and how ECL programmers can use it to analyze data from within the ECL Watch user interface.

Novel Applications

• Leveraging Intra-Node Parallelization in HPCC Systems Watch Recording / View Slides
  Fabian Fier, Humboldt University Berlin
  Fabian shows how it may be possible to get more parallelization in distributed systems for some problems, such as set similarity, which has many applications including plagiarism detection, community mining in social media, document clustering and more.
• Expanding HPCC Systems Deep Neural Network Capabilities Watch Recording / View Slides / View Poster
  Robert Kennedy, Florida Atlantic University
  Robert joined the HPCC Systems intern program for the second time in 2019. In this presentation, Robert takes us through the work he completed during his internship, which involved integrating GPUs to help accelerate deep learning on HPCC Systems. His GPU Enabled Deep Learning Bundle, is available in our github repository. As part of this work he also implemented a tool to automate the build process for making virtual machine images with HPCC Systems installed.

Cloud Enablement

• Docker Support Watch Recording / View Slides
  Xiaoming Wang & Godson Fortil, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Learn about Docker and Kubernetes and find out how to use HPCC Systems Docker and Kubernetes in your development workflow. A demonstration of how to deploy HPCC systems on AWS EKS is included in this presentation.

General Session – HPCC Systems Roadmap Tech Talks and Website

The talks in this session focus on new features added recently and how to use them. There’s also a window into the world of how the HPCC Systems platform team works and a sneak peak into features and enhancements planned for the near future. This session closed with the launch of our new website.

Watch the presentations in this session:

• Advancements in HPCC Systems Machine Learning Watch Recording / View Slides
  Roger Dev, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Listen to Roger give an aerial view of the HPCC Systems Machine Learning Library and the most recent improvements. The development theme for 2019 was to expand the library to handle multimedia and unsupervised learning. Roger takes us on a quick tour of evaluation metrics, Text Vectors and the Generalised Neural Network (GNN) bundle. Blog posts are also available for Text Vectors and GNN. In fact all Roger’s machine learning blog posts are available here.
• Clustering Methods of the HPCC Systems Machine Learning Library Watch Recording / View Slides
  Lili Xu, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Learn about KMeans and DBSCAN, two new clustering methods available in the HPCC Systems Machine Learning Library which are similar but different. Lili takes us through the application of these methods, providing an analysis of when to use which clustering method. Related detailed blog posts written by Lili on both methods are also available here.
• Geohashing with Uber’s H3 Geospatial Index Watch Recording / View Slides
  Gordon Smith, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Gordon introduces the concept of geohashing using Uber’s hexagon based geospatial index and demonstrates the capabilties of the H3 Geohashing Library Plugin, now available in HPCC Systems. Learn about the API functions and how to use some of them as Gordon walks through the process of creating a zoomable, interactive map of a dataset using ROXIE.
• Release Cycle Changes Watch Recording / View Slides
  Attila Vamos, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  In the last year, the HPCC Systems platform team has made changes to the way they work to make the release cycle more responsive to change. By releasing in smaller increments more frequently,  to make the adoption of new features quicker and easier.
• Path to HPCC Systems 8.0  Watch Recording / View Slides 
  Gavin Halliday, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Gavin talks about the platform features and enhancements coming down the line including improved cloud support, interoperability with third party products, improving productivity to make the systems easier to use and more security related additions.
• Community Website: Virtual Ribbon Cutting Watch Recording / View Slides
  Jessica Lorti, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
  Our website has a new look and feel. Jessica shows how the improvements that have been made will support both new and existing users find what they want effortlessly. Learn about the new Easy Guide to HPCC Systems section and see how we have improved our Data Lake messaging and now provide our website in Chinese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Closing / Adjourn Watch Recording / View Slides
  Trish McCall & Flavio Villanustre

2019 HPCC Systems Community Day – Interactive Expo

We like to slightly change the format of our summit every year, introducing something a little different each time. This year, we thought it would be interesting and fun to hold an Interactive Expo including demonstrations showing how others use HPCC Systems and providing opportunities to talk to those involved in the development and support of our open source platform.

Throughout the day, our Interactive Expo was running during the breaks and over lunchtime. There were twelve displays, providing a wide variety of experiences as well opportunities to network and knowledge share.

Athlete Performance – Test Your Strength Against Thor
North Carolina State University – Vincent Freeh and Chris Connelly

Vincent and Chris presented a talk during Community Day about their Athlete 360 project to monitor the performance of athletes with a view to tailor making training programs designed to improve team performance. Their Expo demonstration provided a fun test for delegates who had to do a bicep curl as fast as they could using the gym equipment provided. Vincent and Chris collected the data which was processed and manipulated using HPCC Systems. The result was that they could compare each session, tracking a person’s best performance and show trends over time.

Flavio Villanustre had a go and topped the leaderboard for a while in the competition:

But the eventual winner was Vannel Zeufack, our third place poster winner from Kennesaw State University.

Nasa Rover Launcher
NSU University School Sharks Robotics Team

The HPCC Systems Academic Program has sponsored this project for a number of years. Every year, the robotics team showcase their latest robot, bringing their current competition robot to Community Day 2019 to show us what it can do. It has 8 motors and is able to climb steps, flip discs and shoot balls at high speeds. These high schoolers and their robot got a lot of attention!

^{NSU University School students demonstrating their Nasa Rover Launcher}

Autonomous Security Robot
American Heritage School – Team 5472 – Stallion Robotics

This high school robotics team has also been sponsored by HPCC Systems for a number of years. The idea for this robot came about after a number of schools hit the news because of serious security lapses. Their aim is to provide a robot that can recognise potential risks on a school campus that might otherwise be missed by the human eye. Using object and facial recognition, they can capture faces and recognise them with 93% accuracy using Tensorflow. Jack Fields (4th from the left below), entered our 2019 Technical Poster Contest featuring the work done on this robot. See his poster here.

^{AHS Team 5472 with the program director, Taiowa Donovan (far left), Flavio Villanustre (far right)
and their Autonomous Security Robot}

If you want to see these robots in action, watch this video.

HPCC Systems Tools – Tombolo, ECL Cloud IDE and IoT Hub
Jerry Jacob, Manager Software Engineering, Jeremy Clements, Software Engineer III, Chris Human, Software Engineer II, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

We often hear about tools our users have created to work alongside HPCC Systems for specific uses. These tools were demonstrated by their creators providing a great opportunity to see them in action.

Tombolo is a data cataloging tool which captures the metadata of HPCC systems files, indexes and queries etc. While Data Lake architectures provide the capability to ingest data rapidly and transform it, tracking and documenting datasets (data dictionaries), capturing compliance (HIPAA, GLB, DPPA, GDPR etc.), managing compliance to transformation rules, recording lineage of data and ownership is a non-trivial task. Tombolo helps in keeping a record of all your assets in the Data Lake and how they are being used. This enables both developers and stakeholders (product owners and auditors) manage data assets quickly and efficiently.

Below is a screenshot showing Tombolo in action:

ECL Cloud IDE is a web based development environment (IDE) which helps users get started with ECL quickly without having to setup a desktop IDE. With the advent of cloud based implementations, there is a demand for cloud ready tools that are both powerful and easy to use. ECL Cloud IDE is a complete coding environment for both advanced data scientists and beginning ECL developers. The Cloud IDE is designed to reduce the learning curve to execute data science projects by providing an intuitive online experience.

The screenshot below shows that working with datasets and sharing an integrated application experience with others has never been easier.

IoT Hub is used to onboard IoT customers and data. HPCC Systems is used behind the scenes to store the data from IoT devices. With the increase in the widespread collection and analysis of data related to Internet of Things, tools that are powerful and easy to use are lacking. The IoT Hub provides a plug and play environment by integrating an HPCC Systems backend with an administrative user interface to manage devices, collect data and execute related analysis workflows.

The IoT Hub currently supports Fitbit, Ecobee, Nest and Connected Car API as shown below.

If you have created a similar, complimentary tool that works alongside HPCC Systems that you’d like to share with our open source community, tell us about it! We’d love to feature it at our Interactive Expo during Community Day 2020.

Meet the Experts – Platform Lab, ML Librarians and Live from the Forums
Russ Whitehead, Architect,  Roger Dev Sr Architect, Lili Xu, Software Engineer III, Bob Foreman, Sr Software Engineer and Richard Taylor Sr Consulting Software Engineer, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Our forums are a great place for meeting HPCC Systems users who are trying to solve similar problems. Our developers are extremely knowledgeable about the platform and how to use it to meet a wide variety of different applications.

Our walk-in labs presented the perfect opportunity for our community users to meet HPCC Systems team members and talk to them in person about current thoughts and issues on their mind. This was a very sociable area to visit with additional members of the team turning up to help colleagues advise as many delegates as possible.

The Platform Lab was hosted by Russ Whitehead, but he was joined at various points by other colleagues including Sarah Fabius (shown below).

Roger Dev and Lili Xu were on hand to focus on machine learning related questions. Roger is the leader of our Machine Learning Library and also a key player in our Academic Program, providing advice to many of our academic collaborators and their students. Lili Xu joined the HPCC Systems Intern Program three years running, working on projects that contributed to her PhD in Computer Science from Clemson University. She now works at LexisNexis Risk Solutions and has an extensive knowledge of clustering algorithms.

Richard Taylor and Bob Foreman are our HPCC Systems ECL trainers. To many in our open source community they will need no introduction.

As well as providing hands on training throughout the year, they also monitor our Community Forum. Their Interactive Expo Lab transported our Forum from our website to Community Day, delivering the same expert advice face to face.

Sponsor Booths – Dell Technologies, Infosys, LexisNexis Risk Solutions
Monu Aul, Dell Technologies, Joe DeMuyt, Infosys and Jessica Lorti with the HPCC Systems Booth

Our Interactive Expo would not have been complete without sponsor booths showcasing their business acumen. While it’s easy to find out about any company just by doing a Google search, nothing beats being able to talk to someone who knows the business and can hand you information to read that may prove very useful later.

Jessica Lorti was at our own booth which looks a little like a cafe. This booth goes on the road with our team, providing demos, information about our open source project and our academic and intern programs.

Look out for us at one of our upcoming events!

Of course, where there are booths there is also swag! Lots of fun, nifty little gadgets and some sweet treats to keep the blood sugar up!

In addition to Dell Technologies and Infosys, we were also sponsored by Datum Software and KForce Technology Staffing. A hearty thanks to all our sponsors for investing in our HPCC Systems Community Day Summit event. We couldn’t have done it without your support!

Thanks also to our MC, Trish McCall, our speakers and everyone who participated for making our 2019 Community Day Summit such a success and sharing in our 20th anniversary celebrations.

Join us at Community Day 2020 when we will celebrate the coming of age of HPCC Systems. If you’d like to present about your HPCC Systems related project or use case, contact us and tell us about it!