Author Archive
In this month’s Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, a rematch of the MapReduce debate was staged. In the original debate, Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker, both giants of the database community, complained that: 1. MapReduce is a step backwards in database access 2. MapReduce is a poor implementation 3. MapReduce is not novel…
The networking world remains one of the last bastions of the mainframe computing design point. Back in 1987 Garth Gibson, Dave Patterson, and Randy Katz showed we could aggregate low-cost, low-quality commodity disks into storage subsystems far more reliable and much less expensive than the best purpose-built storage subsystems (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). The…
I’m on the technical program committe for ACM Science Cloud 2010. You should consider both submitting a paper and attending the conference. The conference will be held in Chicago on June21st, 2010 colocated with ACM HPDC 2010 (High Performance Distributed Computing). The call for papers abstracst are due Feb 22 with final papers due March…
There were three big announcements this week at Amazon Web Services. All three announcements are important but the first is the one I’m most excited about in that it is a fundamental innovation in how computation is sold. The original EC2 pricing model was on-demand pricing. This is the now familiar pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-grow pricing…
Want to join a startup team within Amazon Web Services? I’m deeply involved and excited about this project and another couple of talented engineers could really make a difference. We are looking for: User Interface Software Development Engineer We are looking for an experienced engineer with a proven track record of building high quality, AJAX…
For several years I’ve been interested in PUE<1.0 as a rallying cry for the industry around increased efficiency. From PUE and Total Power Usage Efficiency (tPUE) where I talked about PUE<1.0: In the Green Grid document [Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE], it says that “the PUE can range from 1.0…
Very low-power scale-out servers — it’s an idea whose time has come. A few weeks ago Intel announced it was doing Microslice servers: Intel Seeks new ‘microserver’ standard. Rackable Systems (I may never manage to start calling them ‘SGI’ – remember the old MIPS-based workstation company?) was on this idea even earlier: Microslice Servers. The…
Sometime back I whined that Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) is a seriously abused term: PUE and Total Power Usage Efficiency. But I continue to use it because it gives us a rough way to compare the efficiency of different data centers. It’s a simple metric that takes the total power delivered to a facility (total…
I’m on the program committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. The conference will be held June 10th and 11th 2010 in Indianapolis Indiana. SOCC brings together database and operating systems researchers and practitioners interested in cloud computing. It is jointly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and…
HPTS has always been one of my favorite workshops over the years. Margo Seltzer was the program chair this year and she and the program committee brought together one of the best programs ever. Earlier I posted my notes from Andy Bectolsheim’s session Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 and his slides Technologies for Data Intensive…
In an earlier post Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 I put my notes up on Andy Bechtolsheim’s excellent talk at HPTS 2009. His slides from that talk are now available: Technologies for Data Intensive Computing. Strongly recommended. James Hamilton e: jrh@mvdirona.com w: http://www.mvdirona.com b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Just about exactly one year ago, I posted a summary and the slides from an excellent Butler Lampson talk: The Uses of Computers: What’s Past is Merely Prologue. Its time for another installment. Butler was at SOSP 2009 a few weeks back and Marvin Theimer caught up with him for a wide ranging discussion on…
Last week AWS announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and I blogged that it was big step forward for the cloud storage world: Amazon RDS, More Memory, and Lower Prices. This really is an important step forward in that a huge percentage of commercial applications are written to depend upon Relational Databases. But,…
Recently I came across Steve Souder’s Velocity 2009 presentation: High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Loading Pages. Steve is an excellent speaker and the author of two important web performance books: · High Performance Web Sites · Even Faster Web Sites The reason this presentation caught my interest is it focused on 1)…
I’ve worked on our around relational database systems for more than 20 years. And, although I freely admit that perfectly good applications can, and often are, written without using a relational database system, it’s simply amazing how many of world’s commercial applications depend upon them. Relational database offerings continue to be the dominant storage choice…
I’ve attached below my rough notes from Andy Bechtolsheim’s talk this morning at High Performance Transactions Systems 2009. The agenda for HPTS 2009 is up at: http://www.hpts.ws/agenda.html. Andy is a founder of Sun Microsystems and of Arista Networks and is an incredibly gifted hardware designer. He’s consistently able to innovate and push the design limits…
In this month’s Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, a rematch of the MapReduce debate was staged. In the original debate, Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker, both giants of the database community, complained that: 1. MapReduce is a step backwards in database access 2. MapReduce is a poor implementation 3. MapReduce is not novel…
The networking world remains one of the last bastions of the mainframe computing design point. Back in 1987 Garth Gibson, Dave Patterson, and Randy Katz showed we could aggregate low-cost, low-quality commodity disks into storage subsystems far more reliable and much less expensive than the best purpose-built storage subsystems (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks). The…
I’m on the technical program committe for ACM Science Cloud 2010. You should consider both submitting a paper and attending the conference. The conference will be held in Chicago on June21st, 2010 colocated with ACM HPDC 2010 (High Performance Distributed Computing). The call for papers abstracst are due Feb 22 with final papers due March…
There were three big announcements this week at Amazon Web Services. All three announcements are important but the first is the one I’m most excited about in that it is a fundamental innovation in how computation is sold. The original EC2 pricing model was on-demand pricing. This is the now familiar pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-grow pricing…
Want to join a startup team within Amazon Web Services? I’m deeply involved and excited about this project and another couple of talented engineers could really make a difference. We are looking for: User Interface Software Development Engineer We are looking for an experienced engineer with a proven track record of building high quality, AJAX…
For several years I’ve been interested in PUE<1.0 as a rallying cry for the industry around increased efficiency. From PUE and Total Power Usage Efficiency (tPUE) where I talked about PUE<1.0: In the Green Grid document [Green Grid Data Center Power Efficiency Metrics: PUE and DCiE], it says that “the PUE can range from 1.0…
Very low-power scale-out servers — it’s an idea whose time has come. A few weeks ago Intel announced it was doing Microslice servers: Intel Seeks new ‘microserver’ standard. Rackable Systems (I may never manage to start calling them ‘SGI’ – remember the old MIPS-based workstation company?) was on this idea even earlier: Microslice Servers. The…
Sometime back I whined that Power Usage Efficiency (PUE) is a seriously abused term: PUE and Total Power Usage Efficiency. But I continue to use it because it gives us a rough way to compare the efficiency of different data centers. It’s a simple metric that takes the total power delivered to a facility (total…
I’m on the program committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. The conference will be held June 10th and 11th 2010 in Indianapolis Indiana. SOCC brings together database and operating systems researchers and practitioners interested in cloud computing. It is jointly sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and…
HPTS has always been one of my favorite workshops over the years. Margo Seltzer was the program chair this year and she and the program committee brought together one of the best programs ever. Earlier I posted my notes from Andy Bectolsheim’s session Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 and his slides Technologies for Data Intensive…
In an earlier post Andy Bechtolsheim at HPTS 2009 I put my notes up on Andy Bechtolsheim’s excellent talk at HPTS 2009. His slides from that talk are now available: Technologies for Data Intensive Computing. Strongly recommended. James Hamilton e: jrh@mvdirona.com w: http://www.mvdirona.com b: http://blog.mvdirona.com / http://perspectives.mvdirona.com
Just about exactly one year ago, I posted a summary and the slides from an excellent Butler Lampson talk: The Uses of Computers: What’s Past is Merely Prologue. Its time for another installment. Butler was at SOSP 2009 a few weeks back and Marvin Theimer caught up with him for a wide ranging discussion on…
Last week AWS announced the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and I blogged that it was big step forward for the cloud storage world: Amazon RDS, More Memory, and Lower Prices. This really is an important step forward in that a huge percentage of commercial applications are written to depend upon Relational Databases. But,…
Recently I came across Steve Souder’s Velocity 2009 presentation: High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Loading Pages. Steve is an excellent speaker and the author of two important web performance books: · High Performance Web Sites · Even Faster Web Sites The reason this presentation caught my interest is it focused on 1)…
I’ve worked on our around relational database systems for more than 20 years. And, although I freely admit that perfectly good applications can, and often are, written without using a relational database system, it’s simply amazing how many of world’s commercial applications depend upon them. Relational database offerings continue to be the dominant storage choice…
I’ve attached below my rough notes from Andy Bechtolsheim’s talk this morning at High Performance Transactions Systems 2009. The agenda for HPTS 2009 is up at: http://www.hpts.ws/agenda.html. Andy is a founder of Sun Microsystems and of Arista Networks and is an incredibly gifted hardware designer. He’s consistently able to innovate and push the design limits…