Author Archive
In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type (AWS Designed Processor: Graviton). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation. In our industry,…
At SIGMOD 2019 in Amsterdam last month it was announced that the Amazon Aurora service has been awarded the 2019 SIGMOD Systems Award. From the awards committee: The SIGMOD Systems Award is awarded to an individual or set of individuals to recognize the development of a software or hardware system whose technical contribqutions have had…
Back in late 2008 and early 2009, I had a few projects underway. One was investigating the impact of high temperatures on the longevity and fault rates in servers. We know what it costs to keep a data center cool, but what I wanted to know is what it would cost if we didn’t keep…
Tesla hosted Autonomy Day for Analyst on Monday April 22nd beginning at 11am. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE. It’s a bit unusual for a corporate video in that it is 3 hours and 52 minutes long but it’s also unusual in that there is far more real content in there than is typically shown…
At Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, I introduced the first Amazon Web Services custom silicon. The ASIC I showed formed the foundational core of our second generation custom network interface controllers and, even back in 2016, there was at least one of these ASICs going into every new…
At 1:30:34AM on Jun 17, 2017 the USS Fitzgerald and the container ship ACX Crystal came together just south of Yokosuka Japan. The ACX Crystal is a 730’ modern containership built in 2008 and capable of carrying 2,858 TEU of containers at a 23-knot service speed. The Fitzgerald is a $1.8B US Navy Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer…
On Monday night I described AWS Graviton , the general-purpose AWS-developed server processor with 64-bit Arm that powers the EC2 A1 instance family. The five members of the A1 instance family target scale-out workloads such as web servers, caching fleets, and development workloads. This is the first general-purpose processor that has been designed, developed, and…
This is an exciting day and one I’ve been looking forward to for more than a decade. As many of you know, the gestation time for a new innovation at AWS can incredibly short. Some of our most important services went from good ideas to successful, heavily-used services in only months. But, custom silicon is…
Many years ago, Amazon chose to use Oracle database products to run the business. At the time it was a perfectly rational decision and, back then, many customers made the same choice and some took a different path. I’ve worked on both DB2 and SQL Server over the years so I know well the arguments on…
Earlier this year, Berkeley’s Dave Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessy won the 2017 Turing Award, the premier award in Computing. From Pioneers of Computer Architecture Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award: NEW YORK, NY, March 21, 2018 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor…
This originally came up in an earlier blog comment but it’s an interesting question and one not necessarily one restricted to the changes driven by deep learning training and other often GPU-hosted workloads. This trend has been underway for a long time and is more obvious when looking at networking which was your example as…
It’s hard to believe that a relational database in personal use at home will ever have much of a load when it comes to transaction processing but our home RDBMS is surprisingly busy, with more than a hundred database interactions per second. It’s still not even within an order of magnitude as busy as many…
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a…
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport suffered a massive power failure yesterday where the entire facility except for emergency lighting and safety equipment was down for nearly 11 hours. The popular press coverage on this power failure is extensive but here are two examples: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/power-outage-halts-flights-at-atlanta-international-airport-1513543883 (pay wall) CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/17/us/atlanta-airport-power-outage/index.html For most years since 1998, Atlanta International…
This morning, I was thinking about Apple. When I got started in this industry in the early 80s, it was on an Apple II+ writing first in BASIC and later in UCSD Pascal. I thought Apple was simply amazing, so it was tough watching the more than decade of decline before Jobs rejoined. Our industry…
For years I’ve been saying that, as more and more workloads migrate to the cloud, the mass concentration of similar workloads make hardware acceleration a requirement rather than an interesting option. When twenty servers are working on a given task, it makes absolutely no sense to do specialized hardware acceleration. When one thousand servers are…
In November of last year, AWS announced the first ARM-based AWS instance type (AWS Designed Processor: Graviton). For me this was a very big deal because I’ve been talking about ARM based servers for more than a decade, believing that massive client volumes fund the R&D stream that feeds most server-side innovation. In our industry,…
At SIGMOD 2019 in Amsterdam last month it was announced that the Amazon Aurora service has been awarded the 2019 SIGMOD Systems Award. From the awards committee: The SIGMOD Systems Award is awarded to an individual or set of individuals to recognize the development of a software or hardware system whose technical contribqutions have had…
Back in late 2008 and early 2009, I had a few projects underway. One was investigating the impact of high temperatures on the longevity and fault rates in servers. We know what it costs to keep a data center cool, but what I wanted to know is what it would cost if we didn’t keep…
Tesla hosted Autonomy Day for Analyst on Monday April 22nd beginning at 11am. The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE. It’s a bit unusual for a corporate video in that it is 3 hours and 52 minutes long but it’s also unusual in that there is far more real content in there than is typically shown…
At Tuesday Night Live with James Hamilton at the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference, I introduced the first Amazon Web Services custom silicon. The ASIC I showed formed the foundational core of our second generation custom network interface controllers and, even back in 2016, there was at least one of these ASICs going into every new…
At 1:30:34AM on Jun 17, 2017 the USS Fitzgerald and the container ship ACX Crystal came together just south of Yokosuka Japan. The ACX Crystal is a 730’ modern containership built in 2008 and capable of carrying 2,858 TEU of containers at a 23-knot service speed. The Fitzgerald is a $1.8B US Navy Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer…
On Monday night I described AWS Graviton , the general-purpose AWS-developed server processor with 64-bit Arm that powers the EC2 A1 instance family. The five members of the A1 instance family target scale-out workloads such as web servers, caching fleets, and development workloads. This is the first general-purpose processor that has been designed, developed, and…
This is an exciting day and one I’ve been looking forward to for more than a decade. As many of you know, the gestation time for a new innovation at AWS can incredibly short. Some of our most important services went from good ideas to successful, heavily-used services in only months. But, custom silicon is…
Many years ago, Amazon chose to use Oracle database products to run the business. At the time it was a perfectly rational decision and, back then, many customers made the same choice and some took a different path. I’ve worked on both DB2 and SQL Server over the years so I know well the arguments on…
Earlier this year, Berkeley’s Dave Patterson and Stanford’s John Hennessy won the 2017 Turing Award, the premier award in Computing. From Pioneers of Computer Architecture Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award: NEW YORK, NY, March 21, 2018 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor…
This originally came up in an earlier blog comment but it’s an interesting question and one not necessarily one restricted to the changes driven by deep learning training and other often GPU-hosted workloads. This trend has been underway for a long time and is more obvious when looking at networking which was your example as…
It’s hard to believe that a relational database in personal use at home will ever have much of a load when it comes to transaction processing but our home RDBMS is surprisingly busy, with more than a hundred database interactions per second. It’s still not even within an order of magnitude as busy as many…
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a…
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport suffered a massive power failure yesterday where the entire facility except for emergency lighting and safety equipment was down for nearly 11 hours. The popular press coverage on this power failure is extensive but here are two examples: WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/power-outage-halts-flights-at-atlanta-international-airport-1513543883 (pay wall) CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/17/us/atlanta-airport-power-outage/index.html For most years since 1998, Atlanta International…
This morning, I was thinking about Apple. When I got started in this industry in the early 80s, it was on an Apple II+ writing first in BASIC and later in UCSD Pascal. I thought Apple was simply amazing, so it was tough watching the more than decade of decline before Jobs rejoined. Our industry…
For years I’ve been saying that, as more and more workloads migrate to the cloud, the mass concentration of similar workloads make hardware acceleration a requirement rather than an interesting option. When twenty servers are working on a given task, it makes absolutely no sense to do specialized hardware acceleration. When one thousand servers are…