Archive For March 29, 2009
I participated in the Self Managing Database Systems closing panel titled Grand Challenges in Database Self-Management. Also on the panel were: Anastassia Ailamaki (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) Shivnath Babu (Duke University, USA) Nicolas Bruno (Microsoft Research, USA) Benoît Dageville (Oracle, USA) James Hamilton (Amazon, USA) Sam Lightstone (IBM Toronto Software Lab, Canada) Ken…
Today , I’m at the Self Managing Database Systems workshop which is part of the International Conference on Data Engineering in Shanghai. At last year’s ICDE, I participated in a panel: International Conference on Data Engineering 2008. Earlier today, I did the SMDB keynote where I presented: Cloud Computing Economies of Scale. The key points…
There has been lots of speculation about the new name for Microsoft Search. The most prevalent speculation is that Live.com will be branded Kumo: Microsoft to Rebrand Search. Will it be Kumo? Confirming that the Kumo brand is definitely the name that is being tested internally at Microsoft, I’ve noticed over the last week that…
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been getting more interested in Erlang as an high-scale services implementation language originally designed at Ericcson. Back in May of last year I posted: Erlang and High-Scale System Software. The Erlang model of spawning many lightweight threads that communicate via message passing is typically less efficient than the…
From Data Center Knowledge yesterday: Rackable Turns up the Heat, we see the beginnings of the next class of server innovations. This one is going to be important and have lasting impact. The industry will save millions of dollars and megawatts of power ignoring the capital expense reductions possible. Hat’s off to Rackable Systems to…
HotCloud ’09 is a workshop that will be held at the same time as USENIX ’09 (June 14 through 19, 2009). The CFP: Join us in San Diego, CA, June 15, 2009, for the Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. HotCloud ’09 seeks to discuss challenges in the Cloud Computing paradigm including the design,…
This the third posting in the series on heterogeneous computing. The first two were: 1. Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs and FPGAs 2. Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs: NVidia GT200 This post looks more deeply at the AMD/ATI RV770. The latest GPU from AMD/ATI is the RV770 architecture. The processor contains 10 SIMD cores, each with 16…
In the last posting, Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs: NVidia GT200 I promised the next post would be a follow-on look at the AMD/ATI RV770. However, over the weekend, Niraj Tolia of HP Labs sent this my way as a follow-up on the set of articles on GPGPU Programming. Prior to reading this note, I hadn’t…
In Heterogeneous Computing using GPGPUs and FPGAs I looked at the Heterogeneous computing, the application of multiple instruction set architectures within a single application program under direct programmer control. Heterogeneous computing has been around for years but usage has been restricted to fairly small niches. I’m predicting that we’re going to see abrupt and steep…
It’s not at all uncommon to have several different instruction sets employed in a single computer. Decades ago IBM mainframes had I/O processing systems (channel processors). Most client systems have dedicated graphics processors. Many networking cards off-load the transport stack (TCP/IP off load). These are all examples of special purpose processors used to support general…
Google Maps is a wonderfully useful tool for finding locations around town or around the globe. Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon is a developer tool-kit for navigating wall-sized or larger displays using pan and zoom. Here’s the same basic tiled picture display technique (different implementation) applied to navigating the Linux kernel: Linux Kernel Map. The kernel…
Febuary 28th, Cloud Camp Seattle was held at an Amazon facility in Seattle. Cloud Camp is described organizers as an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you…
Whenever I see a huge performance number without the denominator, I shake my head. It’s easy to get a big performance number on almost any dimension but what is far more difficult is getting a great work done per dollar. Performance alone is not interesting. I’m super interested in flash SSDs and see great potential…
In the current ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review, there is an article on data center networking, Cost of a Cloud: Research Problems in Data Center Networks by Albert Greenberg, David Maltz, Parveen Patel, and myself. Abstract: The data centers used to create cloud services represent a significant investment in capital outlay and ongoing costs. Accordingly,…
Yesterday Amazon Web Services announced availability of Windows and SQL Server under Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in the European region. Running in the EU is important for workloads that need to be near customers in that region or workloads that operate on data that needs to stay in region. The AWS Management Console has been…
Earlier this evening I attended the Washington Technology Industry Association event Scaling into the Cloud with Amazon Web Services. Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services gave an overview of AWS and was followed by two AWS customers each of which talked about their services and how they use AWS. My rough notes follow. Adam…