Dr. Jim Gray
Commodity SuperComputing and SuperStorage
Thursday, September 21 , 2000
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:00 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Goddard's Office of the Assistant Director for Information Sciences launches GSFC's inaugural Information Sciences and Technology (IS&T) Colloquium Fall 2000 Series with 1998 Turing Award Winner, Dr. Jim Gray, who has been building inexpensive mega-servers from commodity components. The most successful of these have been the TerraServer, the PetaBumps demo, and the 10,000$ Terabyte. He has also been working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and more generally with the National Virtual Observatory to build a distributed system to store and analyze historical and current astronomy datasets. This talk will survey each of these efforts and discuss some of our successes and failures.

Dr. Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. At Microsoft his research focuses on scaleable computing: building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems. He is editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and co-author of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the ACM, a member of the President's IT Advisory Council (PITAC), and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management. He received the 1998 Turing award for his work on transaction processing and database systems.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: John Schnase