Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium

4:15PM, Wednesday, April 29, 1998
NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03

Can you really Build SuperComputers from Commodity CyberBricks?


About the talk:
Fat servers are the dual of thin clients. Many forces are pushing us to build huge compute and storage servers. The hardware to build such servers is from commodity components is available today. Even more extraordinary hardware is expected soon. The required software has been slow to arrive. There are a few success stories: transaction processing systems, parallel database systems for datamining, and more recently web servers. This talk explains the key properties that enabled these successes: a simple programming model and parallelism that comes from many small requests or from massive dataflows.

About the speaker:

Jim Gray is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, http://research.microsoft.com/barc/gray .

Dr. Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. At Microsoft his research focuses on scaleable computing: building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and coauthor of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He holds doctorates from Berkeley and Stuttgart, is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, a member of the National Research Council's Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, Trustee of the VLDB Foundation, and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management.

Contact information:

Jim Gray
Microsoft Research
310 Howard Street \#830
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 778-8222
(451) 778-8210
Gray@Microsoft.com