Jim Gray

Microsoft Distinguished Engineer

SDForum
102 minutes, 35.1mb, recorded 2003-09-18
This presentation, Distributed Computing Economics, considers the relative costs of computing resources and the implications this has for distributed system design. Today there is rough price parity between (1) one database access, (2) ten bytes of network traffic, (3) 100,000 instructions, (4) 10 bytes of disk storage, and (5) a megabyte of disk bandwidth. This has implications for how one structures Internet-scale distributed computing: one puts computing as close to the data as possible in order to avoid expensive network traffic. If there is time, the talk will then cover what the architecture we are evolving for the World-Wide Telescope -- a federation of the worlds' astronomy data as a collection of web services accessed via portals.

This presentation is from the IT Conversations archives of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.

Jim Gray is a "Distinguished Engineer" in Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC).

Jim is part of Microsoft's research group. His primary research interests are in databases and transaction processing systems. His current work focuses on building supercomputers with commodity components, thereby reducing the cost of storage, processing, and networking by factors of 10x to 1000x over low-volume solutions. This includes work on building fast networks, on building huge web servers with CyberBricks, and building very inexpensive and very high-performance storage servers.

Jim also is working with the astronomy community to build the world-wide telescope and has been active in building online databases like http://terraService.Net and http://skyserver.sdss.org. When the entire world's astronomy data is on the Internet and is accessible as a single distributed database, the Internet will be the world's best telescope. This is part of the larger agenda of getting all information online and easily accessible (digital libraries, digital government, online science ...). He is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He also edits of a series of books on data management.


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