Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: data center
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Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. Instead, information flows freely and often globally. We need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy.
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Egg Baskets, Lambdas and Geo-resilience
The reason we strive to protect data centers is obvious, their failure often has catastrophic business implications. Without doubt, though, some workloads are less affected by failure than others. If your web search for basket weaving supplies times out, you are probably content to retry the query a few seconds later. If your attempt to…
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Matryoshka Dolls and Data Centers
If your “data center” is located in the nearest available space to your laboratory — a retrofitted janitor’s closet – and cooled by two box fans from Walmart, odds are you are not a paragon of PUE virtue, even if your aggregate computing power is small.
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Language Shapes Behavior: Our Poor Cousin, Data
One of the major lessons from web search and cloud data centers is the power of truly massive scale, near real-time data analysis. When anyone with a cheap cell phone and a web browser can extract data and insights from a non-trivial fraction of the human knowledge base, behavior and culture are transformed. I would…
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Nothing Left But the Smile …
Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, it seems increasingly clear that in the high-performance, low latency interconnection network space, we will be left with nothing but the smile. Simply put, the last remaining non-commodity component of HPC clusters – the high-performance interconnect – is in grave danger, due to the global economic…
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Seeding The Clouds
I came to Microsoft to lead a new research initiative in cloud computing, one that complements our production data center infrastructure and our nascent Azure cloud software platform. You can read the press release and the web site for the official story. What follows is my personal perspective.