Technical Collaboration Expanding Anaconda Ecosystem

Continuum Analytics, the creator and driving force behind Anaconda, the leading open data science platform powered by Python, welcomes Intel into the Anaconda ecosystem. Intel has the Anaconda packaging and distribution and is working with Continuum to provide interoperability.

By offering Anaconda as the foundational high-performance Python distribution, Intel is empowering enterprises to more quickly build open analytics applications that drive immediate business value. Organizations can now combine the power of the Intel® Math Kernel Library (MKL) and Anaconda’s Python-based data science to build the high performance analytic modeling and visualization applications required to compete in today’s data-driven economies.

“We have been working closely with Continuum Analytics to bring the capabilities of Anaconda to the Intel Distribution for Python. We include conda, making it easier to install conda packages and create conda environments. You now have easy access to the large and growing set of packages available on Anaconda Cloud,” said Robert Cohn, Engineering Director for Intel’s Scripting and Analysis Tools in his recently posted blog.

“We are in the midst of a computing revolution where intelligent data-driven decisions will drive our every move -- in business and at home. To unleash the floodgates to value, we need to make data science fast, accessible and open to everyone,” said Michele Chambers, VP of Products & CMO at Continuum Analytics. “Python is the defacto data science language that everyone from elementary to graduate school is using because it’s so easy to get started and powerful enough to drive highly complex analytics. Anaconda turbo boosts analytics without adding any complexity.”

Without optimization, high-level languages like Python lack the performance needed to analyze increasingly large data sets. The platform includes packages and technology that are accessible to beginner Python developers and powerful enough to tackle data science projects for Big Data. Anaconda offers support for advanced analytics, numerical computing, just-in-time compilation, profiling, parallelism, interactive visualization, collaboration and other analytic needs. Customers have experienced up to 100x performance increases with Anaconda.

Anaconda Cloud is a package management service that makes it easy to find, access, store and share public and private notebooks, environments, conda and PyPI packages. The Anaconda Cloud also keeps up with updates made to the packages and environments being used. Users are able to build packages using the Anaconda client command line interface (CLI), then manually or automatically upload the packages to Anaconda Cloud to quickly share with others or access from anywhere. The Intel channel on Anaconda Cloud is where users can go to get optimized packages that Intel is providing.

“Companies like Intel, Microsoft and Cloudera are making Open Data Science more accessible to enterprises. We are mutually committed to ensuring customers get access to open and transparent technology advances,” said Travis Oliphant, CEO and co-founder at Continuum Analytics. “Our technical collaborations with Intel and Open Data Science members are expanding and fueling the next generation of high performance computing for data science. Customers can now leverage their Intel-powered computing clusters––with or without Hadoop––along with a supercharged Python distribution to propel their organizations forward and capitalize on their ever growing data assets.”