Turing Award Winner On The Future of Storage

weileong writes "Ars Technica highlights an interview at ACM Queue with Jim Gray, a winner of the ACM Turing award *(among other things) by one of the pioneers of RAID (among other things). Many issues touched upon, including: "programmers have to start thinking of the disk as a sequential device rather than a random access device." "So disks are not random access any more?" "That's one of the things that more or less everybody is gravitating toward. The idea of a log-structured file system is much more attractive. There are many other architectural changes that we'll have to consider in disks with huge capacity and limited bandwidth." Actual interview has MUCH detail, definitely worth reading."

Comments

Re:Solid state is the way to go.

[stratjakt]

Is cost not a good enough reason for you?

HDD = a buck a gig, solid-state = 100 bucks a gig.

Though supposedly magical MRAM will come along and revolutionize the world. OLED screens too. And oh yeah, Duke Nuk'Em Forever.

Next on Slashdot

[Do not eat]

This week: You can make a trade-off between latency and throughput!
Next week: Cars that can haul less can be more fuel-effiecent!
The week after: Algorithms that use more memory, but are faster to execute!

Bandwidth...

[Ratface]

I love his commenta about mailing disks to Europe and Asia..

The biggest problem I have mailing disks is customs. If you mail a disk to Europe or Asia, you have to pay customs, which about doubles the shipping cost and introduces delays.

Thereby adding a corrolary to the old adage "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a vanload of tapes barrelling down the highway"...

"Never underestimate the bottleneck caused by a far-Eastern customs inspector." .-D

Let me just read your mind...

[WIAKywbfatw]

...does anybody else think this sounds familar?

I must have read an article earlier about this same thing, probably by this same guy. Can anybody confirm that?

Thanks to my well-developed powers of telepathy, I can tell you that you have read a previous article on the topic by the same author. So I'm happy to confirm that for you.

I can also tell you, thanks to my equally well-honed powers of clairvoyance, that this post will soon be modded up as funny.

(Sheesh. And I thought that some recent "Ask Slashdot" questions were dumb.)

Re:Let me just read your mind...

[grasshoppa]

I can also tell you, thanks to my equally well-honed powers of clairvoyance, that this post will soon be modded up as funny

Don't flatter yourself.

I tried to use a tape drive this way :-)

[192939495969798999]

When I was really young, I tried to use a tape drive as a sequential hard-disk drive. I figured since the tape drive was sequential access it would work... let's just say it didn't go real fast. I tried to run an EXE from it, on probably a 386 mind you, and yeah. The laundry got done before the EXE ran! (SIGH) Was I *ever* that young?
Still, I am glad to see that the paradigm is now realizeable.

pr0n

[leomekenkamp]

We have a dozen doing TeraServer work; we have about eight in our lab for video archives, backups, and so on.

That's a good excuse to use on my wife: "No honey, those are my ..., uhhm..., video archives."

Jim Gray is a jerk

[Seth Finklestein]

Jim Gray? Why the fuck should I believe anything from a man who demonized future Hall of Famer Pete Rose?

And what does Jim Gray know about storage? He's a sports commentator, and a terrible one at that.

ACM Turing Award Winner

[m1kesm1th]

Does that mean he managed to convince someone he was a computer?

Re:ACM Turing Award Winner

[jc42]

Does that mean he managed to convince someone he was a computer?

My wife likes to tell people that her first job, back in the late 70's, was with a Civil Engineering firm in New York, where her job title was "Computer". She did the calculations (and error checking ;-) for their engineering drawings. She used machines to do this, of course, but those machines were called "calculators".

They've since changed the job title.

Funny how quickly such terminology can change.

The van metaphor

[ArmenTanzarian]

I've seen this a couple times before, but Google seems to come up with nothing useful for it. It doesn't help that every crappy musician who has made a tape sells it out of their crappy van or that so many scientist have the old prussion "van der something" in their names. But perhaps it's crappy musicicans and these van der scientists who really control the highspeed data transfer.

Fuzzy numbers, or can this be right?

[abulafia]

JG Twenty-megabyte disks were considered giant. I believe that the first time I asked anybody, about 1970, disk storage rented for a dollar per megabyte a month. IBM leased rather than sold storage at the time. Each disk was the size of a washing machine and cost around $20,000.

So, one could rent a $20K device for $240/year? Those must have been the days...

That can't be right.

Sneaker net?

[computerlady]

"Sneaker net" was when you used your sneakers to transport data?

Oh my. How old I feel when someone has to ask what "sneaker net" was. And someone has to answer...

And an old one!

[siskbc]

Damn, timothy, when it says June on the article it just might be a dupe, ya know? But it's nice to know that the future of disk access hasn't changed since then.

AMAZING!!!

[X86Daddy]

This is a *MAJOR* breakthrough! Most Turing Test contestants don't even win, but this one can eloquently discuss topics and give complex answers, rather than just turning back the question, Eliza-style.

Can we download a copy of this "Jim Gray" yet?

Re:AMAZING!!!

[cybermace5]

Can we download a copy of this "Jim Gray" yet?

No, too big to transfer over the Internet at this point. You'll have to use UPS.

Re:MRAM saves the day

[HerbieStone]

All the tradeoffs will change radically when MRAM hits the streets. It's potentially denser than disk and DRAM, as fast as static RAM, ...

Yup. And Duke-Nukem Forever will eat Half-Life 2s panties.