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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."

6 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. Huge disks by heironymouscoward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Ceci n'est pas une signature
  4. Bandwidth... by Ratface · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    --

    A little planning goes a long way...
  5. Let me just read your mind... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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
  6. ACM Turing Award Winner by m1kesm1th · · Score: 5, Funny

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