Author Archive
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media spoke at Microsoft Research earlier today. It was a great, wide-ranging talk pounding through 103 slides roaming from social networking, through sensor and ambient computing, to Web2.0. Four themes for the talk: · Thoughts on social networking · Sensors and Ambient Computing · Web 2.0 and Wall Street · Open…
Many massively multi-player games have substantial parts of the game played and scored locally. The only way to get a sufficiently responsive gaming experience is to have the high speed game to player interactions local. Offloading some of the interactions from the server to the client is also an important way to reduce costs since…
It’s finally done! Back in August of 2006 Joe Hellerstein asked me to join him and Mike Stonebraker in producing an article for Foundations and Trends in Database Systems. The project ended up being bigger than I originally understood, and the review process always takes longer than any of us expect. The goal for the…
FusionIO has released specs and pricing data on their new NAND flash SSD: http://www.fusionio.com/products.html (Lintao Zhang of msft Research sent it my way). 100,000 IOPS, 700 MB/s sustained read, and 600 MB/s sustained write. Impressive numbers but let’s dig deeper. In what follows, I compare the specs of the FusionIO part with a “typical” SATA…
SpecPOWER is the first industry standard benchmark that evaluates power and performance characteristics of high volume servers. Yesterday the final spec was released. I have quibbles with this benchmark but they really are mostly quibbles. Generally, I’m thrilled to see a benchmark out there that shines a light on server power consumption. The entire industry…
I’m online over the holidays but everyone’s so busy there isn’t much point in blogging during this period. More important things dominate so I won’t be posting until early January. Have a great holiday. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201
Yesterday Nanosolar announced it has started to sell cheap solar panels at a materials cost of roughly $1/W and a finished panel cost of ~$2/W: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1846022020071218. As a reference point, coal powered electricity is about $1/W when considering the fully burdened cost of the plant and operations. When a new technology is within a factor…
This note on the Google infrastructure was sent my way by Andrew Kadatch (Live Search) by way of Sam McKelvie (Cloud Infrastructure Services). It’s not precise in all dimensions, but it does a good job of bringing together the few facts that have been released by Google, and it points to its references if you…
Last week Google announced their Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. This is a two pronged effort combining external investment with internal Google research. The external investments include $10M in Makani Power, a startup aiming to harness high altitude winds. Makani explains that high altitude winds have the highest energy density of any renewable…
The number 1 Amazon AWS requirement just got met: structured storage. Amazon announced SimpleDB yesterday although it’s not yet available for developers to play with. I’m looking forward to being able to write a simple application against it – I’ve had fun with S3. But, for now, the docs will have to do. In the…
Google announced a project in October 2006 to install 9,212 solar panels on the roof of its headquarters complex. Currently over 90% of these panels are installed and active. They expect the installation will produce 30% of the peak power requirements of the headquarters buildings. For example, as I post this, they report 0.6 MW…
I’ve long argued that the firm and clear division between development and operations common in many companies is a mistake. Development doesn’t feel the pain and understand what it takes to make their services more efficient to operate. Operations tends to hire more people to deal with the mess. It doesn’t work, it isn’t efficient,…
Michael Hunter, who authors the Testing and Debugging blog at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, asked me for an interview on testing related topics some time back. I’ve long lamented that, industry-wide, there isn’t nearly enough emphasis on test and software quality assurance innovation. For large projects, test is often the least scalable part of the development…
Mike Zintel (Windoes Live Core) sent this one my way. It’s a short 2:45 video that is not particularly informative but it is creative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
Amazon doesn’t release much about its inner workings which is unfortunate in that hey do some things notably well and often don’t get credit. My view is that making some of these techniques more public would be a great recruiting tool for Amazon but I understand the argument for secrecy as well. Ronny Kohavi recently…
Some months back I finished a paper with Joe Hellerstein and Michael Stonebraker scheduled to be published in the next issue of Foundations and Trends of Databases. This paper is aimed at describing how current generation database management systems are implemented. I’ll post a reference to it here once it is published. As very small…
Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly media spoke at Microsoft Research earlier today. It was a great, wide-ranging talk pounding through 103 slides roaming from social networking, through sensor and ambient computing, to Web2.0. Four themes for the talk: · Thoughts on social networking · Sensors and Ambient Computing · Web 2.0 and Wall Street · Open…
Many massively multi-player games have substantial parts of the game played and scored locally. The only way to get a sufficiently responsive gaming experience is to have the high speed game to player interactions local. Offloading some of the interactions from the server to the client is also an important way to reduce costs since…
It’s finally done! Back in August of 2006 Joe Hellerstein asked me to join him and Mike Stonebraker in producing an article for Foundations and Trends in Database Systems. The project ended up being bigger than I originally understood, and the review process always takes longer than any of us expect. The goal for the…
FusionIO has released specs and pricing data on their new NAND flash SSD: http://www.fusionio.com/products.html (Lintao Zhang of msft Research sent it my way). 100,000 IOPS, 700 MB/s sustained read, and 600 MB/s sustained write. Impressive numbers but let’s dig deeper. In what follows, I compare the specs of the FusionIO part with a “typical” SATA…
SpecPOWER is the first industry standard benchmark that evaluates power and performance characteristics of high volume servers. Yesterday the final spec was released. I have quibbles with this benchmark but they really are mostly quibbles. Generally, I’m thrilled to see a benchmark out there that shines a light on server power consumption. The entire industry…
I’m online over the holidays but everyone’s so busy there isn’t much point in blogging during this period. More important things dominate so I won’t be posting until early January. Have a great holiday. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201
Yesterday Nanosolar announced it has started to sell cheap solar panels at a materials cost of roughly $1/W and a finished panel cost of ~$2/W: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1846022020071218. As a reference point, coal powered electricity is about $1/W when considering the fully burdened cost of the plant and operations. When a new technology is within a factor…
This note on the Google infrastructure was sent my way by Andrew Kadatch (Live Search) by way of Sam McKelvie (Cloud Infrastructure Services). It’s not precise in all dimensions, but it does a good job of bringing together the few facts that have been released by Google, and it points to its references if you…
Last week Google announced their Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. This is a two pronged effort combining external investment with internal Google research. The external investments include $10M in Makani Power, a startup aiming to harness high altitude winds. Makani explains that high altitude winds have the highest energy density of any renewable…
The number 1 Amazon AWS requirement just got met: structured storage. Amazon announced SimpleDB yesterday although it’s not yet available for developers to play with. I’m looking forward to being able to write a simple application against it – I’ve had fun with S3. But, for now, the docs will have to do. In the…
Google announced a project in October 2006 to install 9,212 solar panels on the roof of its headquarters complex. Currently over 90% of these panels are installed and active. They expect the installation will produce 30% of the peak power requirements of the headquarters buildings. For example, as I post this, they report 0.6 MW…
I’ve long argued that the firm and clear division between development and operations common in many companies is a mistake. Development doesn’t feel the pain and understand what it takes to make their services more efficient to operate. Operations tends to hire more people to deal with the mess. It doesn’t work, it isn’t efficient,…
Michael Hunter, who authors the Testing and Debugging blog at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, asked me for an interview on testing related topics some time back. I’ve long lamented that, industry-wide, there isn’t nearly enough emphasis on test and software quality assurance innovation. For large projects, test is often the least scalable part of the development…
Mike Zintel (Windoes Live Core) sent this one my way. It’s a short 2:45 video that is not particularly informative but it is creative: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o. –jrh James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services Bldg RedW-D/2072, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, 98052 W:+1(425)703-9972 | C:+1(206)910-4692 | H:+1(206)201-1859 | JamesRH@microsoft.com H:mvdirona.com | W:research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh
Amazon doesn’t release much about its inner workings which is unfortunate in that hey do some things notably well and often don’t get credit. My view is that making some of these techniques more public would be a great recruiting tool for Amazon but I understand the argument for secrecy as well. Ronny Kohavi recently…
Some months back I finished a paper with Joe Hellerstein and Michael Stonebraker scheduled to be published in the next issue of Foundations and Trends of Databases. This paper is aimed at describing how current generation database management systems are implemented. I’ll post a reference to it here once it is published. As very small…