A scalable and productive workflow-based cloud platform for big data analytics

As data become big and complex, it is also more challenging to data scientists to extract useful information in a timely fashion. Although many tools and packages are available to them, it is crucial to have a high productive and scalable big data analytics platform to carry out their daily work productively. The objective for our work is to build such a productive data analytics cloud platform by integrating a variety of data analytics tools and packages with a high-level workflow interface. Data scientists are able to use the platform with the workflow interface to design their own pipelines in processing, analyzing, and visualizing data. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of the data analytics cloud architecture supporting a range from small data mining to big data analytics. We also demonstrate the usability of the platform using several case studies.