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Case Study: Deploying A Relationship Hunting Application in the Cloud
In 2008, engineers from Objectivity, Inc. used the Amazon EC2 to scale up a demonstration of a system called Link-Hunter, which was built for a national law enforcement agency. This proof-of-concept application stores more than 100 million phone calls made by more than 1 million individuals and analyzes the relationships between them, up to five degrees of separation.
The cloud environment enabled Objectivity to showcase the behavior of the system: performance was unaffected even as the number of users, amounts of data and degree of parallelism increased exponentially. Using this application in the cloud, an organization would only be limited by the amount of cloud resource they were willing to purchase for a particular exercise.
This diagram illustrates the architecture used to deploy the Link Hunter Demonstration Application in a scalable cloud environment (click thumbnail to view full size image).
Clients are connected to a highly available service layer that manages user-generated analysis tasks. Since each task may be composed of millions of path traversals, these can be delivered into an elastic set of Objectivity/DB-based search agents hosted in the cloud. Due to Objectivity/DB's unique distributed architecture, it does not rely on a single database server to perform queries, allowing the load of the database and link hunting operations to be distributed evenly across the cloud.
This type of deployment is perfectly suited to systems with extremely high peak or continuous loads from thousands of concurrent users. During high demand, additional cloud resources can be provisioned to instantly increase the power of Objectivity/DB. When load resumes to normal levels, cloud resources can be trimmed to suit demand, achieving the ultimate mix of performance and efficiency.
While this presentation has a national security focus, the relationship-tracking functionality could easily be used by virtually any industry or organization - including Homeland Security, fraud detection, online advertising, and social networking. The type of data and relationships will differ depending on the industry or agency project, but the goals and related technological obstacles are similar.
With Objectivity/DB, scaling your applications to new levels in the cloud will no longer be limited by an underperforming centralized database.
Click here to watch a demonstration of this Objectivity/DB-powered proof-of-concept application that analyzes more than 100 million phone calls made by over 1 million individuals to find the relationships between them, up to five degrees of separation - in mere seconds - and on a standard laptop.
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