USASpending moves to big data cloud

The General Services Administration has moved its USASpending.gov site, which tracks and analyzes federal expenditures, to a privately owned big data cloud, officials announced Monday.

A big data cloud essentially is a computer cloud with a built-in way of crunching big data using the Apache Hadoop system.

Hadoop is the basis of most systems for analyzing large amounts of unstructured data. Agencies and businesses often employ Hadoop-enabled systems in proprietary data centers or in regular infrastructure clouds.

The value of a big data cloud is the vendor can both store the customer’s data and perform day-by-day analysis of it, said Ray Muslimani, chief executive of GCE, the company hosting USASpending.gov.

In this case, GCE is taking in federal spending data from a variety of sources, including the Federal Procurement Data System, on a daily or weekly basis and recombining and analyzing that data based on citizen search queries on USASpending.

USASpending completed the move in April, Muslimani said.

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