Visit to MSR SV

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. Mihai Budiu (whom I met at a November event) kindly invited me over. There, I found some great and vibrant teams. Their logistics are nice too — I love their walled offices and lounge areas, it reminded me of what we had at the OSF RI in Cambridge MA (researchers need their space!).

I talked about datacenter issues, scale-out themes and “clouds” (in fact, I covered much of the material that I presented at the Cisco Cloud Symposium back in November). I had the privilege to meet Chuck Thacker in person. I sat down with Chuck’s team first and then with the DryadLINQ team (who were just back from presenting their work at OSDI 08). Dryad + LINQ piqued my interest for this particular use case …. I need to crawl log entries (at eBay, we generate 2+ TB worth every day) and mine the relationships amongst logical/physical entities, in a cross-tier fashion.