Twitter + SGI Supercomputer = Heat Map of Angriest Tweeters locations

Data Scientists are using Twitter data and Super-computer power to understand where positive and negative emotions and responses are being generated.

Silicon Graphics International, or SGI, has partnered with researchers from the University of Illinois to scan international tweets in a project dubbed the Global Twitter Heartbeat. By using SGI’s UV 2000 Big Brain supercomputer, the researchers created real-time heat maps of positive and negative sentiments expressed via Twitter.

This means your angry/excited/nervous/happy tweets are possibly being recorded by an uber-speedy computer in order to stitch together an overall portrait of the Twittersphere’s emotions.

So how does it work? “The project analyses every tweet to assign location (not just GPS-tagged tweets, but processing the text of the tweet itself), and tone values and then visualizes the conversation in a heat map infographic that combines and displays tweet location, intensity and tone,” SGI’s Facebook page reads.

The Global Twitter Heartbeat tracks about 10 percent of the 500 million tweets posted daily — that’s approximately 50 million posts analyzed each day.