PHXdata seeks to unite technologists in the Phoenix area who are engaged in data mining, parsing, visualization, etc. It also serves as a platform for journalists and government officials to connect with civic hackers who want to take public data and make it useful.

The topic for this month's meeting will be an introduction into computing large data sets using Hadoop. Apache Hadoop is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.

In order to be useful for data enthusiasts who likely don't have thousands of computers running at home, the discussion will be geared toward utilizing Amazon EC2. With Amazon EC2, data miners can spin up any number of EC2 instances, have them work together to compute a data set, and then release the instances, which are leased on an hourly basis.