[BDCSG2008] Clouds and ManyCores: The Revolution (Dan Reed)

Dan Reed (former NCSA director now at Microsoft Research) continues with the meeting presentations. His elevator pitch: the infrastructure need to take into account applications and the user experience. Current trend is that monolithic data consolidation is crumbling under dispersion, changing the traditional picture. The flavors of big data can be explored along two dimensions: (regular/irregular) versus (structured/unstructured). He emphasizes on focusing more on the user experience with big data, and how you can manage resource at any given point. Cloud computing can help organically orchestrate this resources on demand. He also show some examples of Dryad (the Microsoft take on map-reduce architectures) and DryadLINQ. Another interesting comment:

Building simple things ain’t easy.

I definitely agree with this one :D. Finally he mention his initiative to bring academics, business, and users together under the big data problem (PCAST NITRD review).