Scaled out Music, Scaled down Infrastructure

By Nicole Hemsoth

February 18, 2013

If you’re one of the 175 million Pandora users, then you have surely experienced the excitement of having the Internet’s most popular radio station introduce you to a brand-new artist or song. While it may seem like magic, there is a perfectly logical explanation behind Pandora’s ability to seemingly read your mind and know your taste in music. The true magic behind Pandora lies hidden in the numbers and data collected from music analysis, personalization, and the music delivery methods it uses.

The Music Genome Project – A Mind Reader for Music

Starting with the analysis of the raw data, musicologists undergo a lengthy process analyzing the distinct characteristics of each piece of music. Pandora’s Music Genome Project looks at more than 450 attributes in order to create a musicological “DNA” for each track, including melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals and lyrics, to name a few. 

It states on Pandora’s website, “the Music Genome Project’s database is built using a methodology that includes the use of precisely defined terminology, a consistent frame of reference, redundant analysis, and ongoing quality control to ensure that data integrity remains reliably high. Pandora does not use machine-listening or other forms of automated data extraction.” In 2012, Pandora’s library had over one million tracks by more than 100,000 artists. When you consider that this categorization is done manually, the scale of the project becomes almost overwhelming.   

Personalizing Power

The Music Genome Project is the largest musical categorization process of its kind. However, what makes Pandora unique and popular is the ability to personalize its music delivery. A user creates a station from a “seed” such as an artist, track, or genre. The Music Genome process then begins finding new songs of the same “DNA” and further personalizes itself as a user starts giving music a “thumbs up” or “thumb down.”

In 2012, users created over 1.6 billion unique stations, each personalized by one of the 175 million registered members. The “thumbs ups” and “thumbs down” feedback is invaluable. Beyond the benefit of personalized stations, Pandora is able to take that feedback and use it to enrich the Music Genome Project, allowing Pandora to curate better stations based on its listeners.

Delivering Music Everywhere You Go

Pandora is the largest Internet based radio station, capturing more than a 70 percent market share in Internet radio listening. In January 2013, Pandora owned an eight percent share of the total U.S. radio market, delivering 1.39 billion hours of music. In 2012, Pandora users listened to 13 billion hours of music. That’s the equivalent of 1.5 million years of straight music listening. 


Of the staggering 13 billion listening hours, 75 percent of the music delivered by Pandora was through mobile and other connected devices. Pandora just recently announced that it has over 1,000 partner integrations – 760 of them being consumer electronic devices such as phones, TVs, Blu-ray players, etc. Pandora is also available in 85 new car models and 175 different aftermarket car radio devices. 

The Technology

In order to maintain the high performance in delivery for each user, Pandora relies heavily on a caching system to help deliver its most popular tracks. Aaron Porter, Pandora’s Director of System Administration, explained that the growing popularity of Pandora presented challenges of scalability and reliability with this caching tier.

At first, Pandora loaded its servers with RAM to ensure a quick and quality experience for the end user. Scalability, however, became extremely difficult with this approach. Pandora turned to Fusion-io and its ioDrive platform, allowing it to use flash memory as a caching tier.

“The ioDrives perform as well as our RAM caches, but offer 10 times the capacity per server,” said Aaron. “Our total frequently-accessed music cache now holds 10 times the songs it used to, which both enhances existing user experience and gives us plenty of headroom for future growth.”

With the increase in capacity and performance delivered by the flash-based servers, Pandora was able to decrease its overall server footprint by 40 percent, allowing it to slow down its scale-out plans, and receive an almost instant ROI from the flash. You can learn more about Pandora’s experience with flash memory in this case study by Fusion-io.

Scaling Users and Scaling Performance

It’s easy to see how impressive Pandora’s technology is when it comes to serving up its music library. But even more astounding is seeing how the company is capable of handling database demands as they continue to add music to their library, refine their personalization algorithms, and grow their user-base. Despite these increasing demands, Fusion-io’s flash-based memory tier has helped slow Pandora’s hardware scale out. It will be interesting to see how Pandora’s continued innovations inside the datacenter, delivering higher performance and reduced energy consumption, will allow the company to enhance it’s magical customer experience.   

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire