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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."
dupe dupe dupe
I think we'd all be better off when solid state, non-mechanical disks become commonplace.
Is there any reason other than cost why we can't have 100Gb solid-state drives yet?
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If I look at the trends of the last decades, while disk sizes increase exponentially, the actual number of top-level objects I store on my systems increases only linearly, and quite slowly. True, I still store individual documents, but I also store AVIs, ISOs, entire photo albums that take gigabytes each.
It's still random access: I can choose and access an object, even individual photos, without scanning through large amounts of unwanted data.
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I love his commenta about mailing disks to Europe and Asia..
.-D
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."
A little planning goes a long way...
...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.)
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
Frankly the interview was painful every time Dave Patterson said something. How many times does he have to ask questions about the concept of mailing a computer? "We mail computers because transferring over the Internet is too slow for these massive data transfers." "Are they computers?" "Yes." "Do you mail them?" "Yes." "It's like a movie." "Uhh ok." "Is it a whole computer that you mail?" "Yes, it is a computer full of hard drives." "Why don't you just use the Internet?" "Because it is too slow."
...
We have a dozen doing TeraServer work; we have about eight in our lab for video archives, backups, and so on.
..., uhhm..., video archives."
That's a good excuse to use on my wife: "No honey, those are my
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
Does that mean he managed to convince someone he was a computer?
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
Apart from speculating as to whether this attempt at FUD was the real payload of the article, did it really say anything that most of us haven't already noticed? Whether Flash or fast SCSI, we could do with an intermediate layer of backing store, with faster random access than current IDE HDDs. And we are fast heading for removable IDE drives to be a better and cheaper tape replacement. And the Internet has limited bandwidth. I'm sorry, but you don't need a Turing prize to work any of that out.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Take this choice quote from the article:
My buddies are being killed by supporting all the Linux variants. It is hard to build a product on top of Linux because every other user compiles his own kernel and there are many different species.
Ain't it sweet? I count five lies:
(1) people being killed by supporting (gasp) operating systems... gosh, horror and violence, not nice at all!
(2) all the Linux "variants", are in fact pretty much one standard, LSB, with several skins
(3) "hard to build a product on top of Linux", rather than, hmmm, Windows? Linux is incredibly easy to build for. I suspect the fact that it's very standard helps.
(4) "every other user compiles his kernel"... maybe at Microsoft. I suspect less than 1 in 20 Linux users ever compiled a kernel.
(5) compiling a kernel means you can't support it... WTF? The kernel is incredibly stable, since most changes are in external modules. And I can't remember a single case where a kernel change broke one of my apps.
(6) (sorry, I was not counting well), "many different species"... well, AFAICS the only difference between the Linux distributions is that they have different packaging methods, different timelines as to their versions, and different UI tools for hardware detection, configuration, etc. Nothing at all that makes life hard.
Look: I just installed Xandros, which is Debian with a nice face. On two different types of machine, and it installed without asking a single question about my hardware except whether the mouse was left or right-handed. Check my journal...
Windows never worked this nicely. Where is the support issue?
In the writing indistry we call this "to condemn with faint praise".
Yeah, Windows kinda works, I mean, it'll run Office without crashing too often, but it's just killing by buddies to have to maintain Win2K, WinXP, and even some older Win98 machines, not to mention we have a whole cupboard simply filled with driver CDs for every PC we have.
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Anyone know what happened to that bloke at keele who
invented a way of cramming 3 Terrabytes on a credit card. Apparently it would have cost about 35 pounds to manufacture. this was a couple of years ago, why hasnt it happened yet?
Surely something like this is the real future of storage ?
Terrabyte on a credit card
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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?
With an ever growing collection of digital photos, I've come to the same conclusion as Jim Gray. Hard disks are superior for backups.
I currently have about 100 GB of images and it takes more than 20 4.7 GB DVD-R discs to create a full backup. Although DVD media is still slightly cheaper than new large capacity IDE drives, the added time and hassle factor of burning 20 disks far out weighs any minor costs savings. Moreover a 3.5" drive in a padded anti-static bag takes up less room in the safe deposit box than 20 DVDs (especially if you have the DVDs in protective jewel cases). And if HD-based-backup lets me avoid some future artists tax on burnable media, so much the better.
A Firewire enclosure and a rotating collection of IDE drives is the way to go.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
His basic idea is 100% correct, but the reson is all wrong. It *IS* much harder to develop an app Linux the myriad of flavours, not because of the kernel, but because every distro has its own versions of libraries. I work for a company that makes Linux software, and we only support RedHat, and even certain versions of RedHat at that. While our product would probably compile against any number of distros, and even the BSDs, we just don't have the time and manpower required to build, test, debug, package, and maintain 15 different releases for every sub-release or patchlevel we have in the product. With Windows products, at least, (unless you are doing some lower-level stuff) if you build something you can be reasonably assured it will run on Windows 2000, or Windows XP, or Windows 2003. Not the same if you build something with RedHat 9 and try to run it on Debian or Suse, etc. And before you go on about "release a source package", not all companies release everything GPL, and want to keep their IP theirs, since they like to put some money on the table at night. It's definitly not FUD to say it is much more effort to develop and release cross platform binaries in Linux than Windows.