
What the Heck is Cliff Up To? - swah
http://www.cliffc.org/blog/2012/04/06/what-the-heck-is-cliff-up-to/
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haberman
"In other words: we got plenty of unreliable CPU, memory, disk & network… but
we can’t get at with the same ease the hardware guys made possible when going
to dram from multiple CPUs connected over internal buses. Until we break that
ease-of-use barrier, we’ll never get every-day programmers coding distributed
systems as easily as we do single machines now."

Isn't that the problem that MapReduce/BigTable/etc. are already solving?

And if the problem you're trying to solve is making distributed systems like
MapReduce/BigTable _themselves_ as easy to code as single-machine systems, I
strongly believe that will never be possible. Distributed systems are far more
complex and have failure modes that don't exist in single-machine systems.
Trying to hide that would only give you a horribly leaky abstraction.

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eternalban
> Isn't that the problem that MapReduce/BigTable/etc. are already solving?

Not in realtime, and it is somewhat cumbersome. I think Dr. Click's friendly
debates with Rich Hickey regarding STMs have been taken to a new level. H20
and Datomic are somewhat competing visions.

Cliff (if you are reading): I think R on top of H2O is an excellent choice,
but as I have been thinking about this same sort of architecture, I would
suggest that front-ending H2O will be Scala's killer app. [I will take the
pill if Trinity shows up :-)]

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moonboots
The github repo for 0xdata's new "h2o" database is still empty, but there's
another interesting project containing highly concurrent in-memory java data
structures: <https://github.com/0xdata/high-scale-lib>

Here's a talk that Cliff gave a while back about writing a lock free hashmap:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2139967204534450862>

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spullara
That is just a fork of the original.

~~~
jbellis
The original is on sourceforge: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-scale-
lib/>

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akkartik
Somehow I always thought Azul was Cliff Click's startup.

~~~
wmf
It was; I guess he has moved on.

~~~
akkartik
He just worked there:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azul_Systems#Company_history>

