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Turing Award Winner On The Future of Storage

Posted by timothy on from the even-smaller-bits dept.

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."

7 of 227 comments (clear)

  1. dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    dupe dupe dupe

  2. Re:Solid state is the way to go. by grub · · Score: 5, Informative


    I think we'd all be better off when solid state, non-mechanical disks become commonplace.

    A company named SolidData sells solid state "drives".

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  3. Very much a pioneer, even IF he works for MS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check out Jim Grey's info page on Microsoft Research He's done research on many diverse and interesting technologies such as distributed computing and sequential I/O performance. There are some nifty sites he has taken part in creating, such as a browsable photo of Earth, and a map of the Universe

  4. Tweaked by Flamesplash · · Score: 4, Informative

    My prof talked about this in my networking class. Apparantly they tweaked the hell out of the data link layer to do this, so it was not a generic data transfer at all.

    --
    "Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
  5. Re:Network speed by CausticWindow · · Score: 3, Informative

    Couldn't find the article with the Slashdot search, but Google produced it. Here it is.

    The real numbers were 8,609 Mbps, which translates roughly into a DVD transfered every five seconds. Btw., it was Switzerland, not the Netherlands.

    Also, I don't understand the part where he mentions bandwidth costs of $1 per gigabyte. Maybe you have to pay that much on the Internet 2, but my DSL costs is somewhere in the region of $0.05 per gigabyte, i figure. Maybe I'm just spoilt.

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    How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
  6. LSFS by smd4985 · · Score: 3, Informative

    For more info on (very-cool) Log-Structed File Systems, check out Mendel's original paper at:

    http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rosenblum91design.htm l

    --
    smd4985
  7. Re:Solid state is the way to go. by ananiasanom · · Score: 3, Informative
    The point is not that solid-state will not get bigger and cheaper (it will), but that disk is getting bigger and cheaper faster.

    So sure, you could replace your current 80Gb disk drive with 80Gb of solid state, but where are you going to store your 50Gb 3D movies in 1000x1000x1000 resolution? They're going to be on disk, and you'll have to deal with the increasing size:bandwidth and size:access-speed ratios. After all, I can buy a smartmedia card with the capacity of my first hard drive for about what I used to pay for a box of floppies, but I still use a hard disk.

    Secondly, as others have pointed out, just as the article describes future disk behaving more like tape, future solid-state memory may behave more like disk. Where is it now? chips can pump out sequential data at close to 1 gigabit, but jumping about in memory is much slower (any expert got figures?).