http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/ 2009-07-14T20:35:27-04:00 http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/ http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2009-01-27T16:05:08-04:00 Randal Burns http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/doku.php?id=blog:amdahl_s_number_and_random_i_o&rev=1233090308&do=diff Alex Szalay sold me on the concept of Amdahl's number, which is a ratio between the number of operations and the amount of I/O. For example, an Amdahl number of 1.0 corresponds to a machine that can do 1 bit of I/O / sec per 1 operation / second. So, the ratio is a comparison of rates that represents the I/O balance of a machine and, thus, is scale-invariant in some sense. text/html 2009-01-06T02:16:46-04:00 Randal Burns http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/doku.php?id=blog:blue_screen_of_death&rev=1231226206&do=diff It turns out that I, much like a PC, can crash. Tonight, I gave a 5 minute extemporaneous talk at CIDR in the Gong Show. I wanted to try out some ideas about how to do big queries incrementally that Nolan and I spoke about last week. I liked the ideas. I'll blog about them tomorrow. text/html 2008-12-12T14:18:54-04:00 Randal Burns http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/doku.php?id=bigdatablog&rev=1229109534&do=diff RSS feed! Thoughts related to the management of large data sets, storage systems, database systems, scientific computing, and anything else that catches my fancy. text/html 2008-08-20T17:14:36-04:00 Randal Burns http://hssl.cs.jhu.edu/~randal/bigdatablog/doku.php?id=blog:khan_....khan_no_semantics_in_uu-oids&rev=1219266876&do=diff If you don't understand the title, look here. You Klingon bastard. I know that I took spelling liberties. Bob Kahn gave the keynote speech at DARPA's Distributed Object Storage and Retrieval (DOSR) workshop. He put forth the notion that globally unique object identifiers should not have semantics. My initial response to this assertion was Whatcha talkin' about Willis?