The paper 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. This talk reviews these issues and considers other data-engineering design rules.
Jim Gray is part of Microsoft's research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim 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 edits of a series of books on data management, and has been active in building online databases like https://terraservice.net and https://skyserver.sdss.org.
Return to Santa Clara Valley Chapter IEEE Computer Society page.