Monday, October 18, 2004

Rob Pike interview

Slashdot interview Rob Pike - co-creator of Plan 9 , now at Google.

Quote:
"We use a number of big (BIG!) piece parts like the Google File System (GFS) and MapReduce (see the paper by Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat in the upcoming OSDI http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html) to build massive engines for processing data. Using those pieces we can harness zillions of machines with a few keystrokes to attack a problem like indexing the entire internet. (OK, it's not quite that easy, but it's still amazing.) I have a daily test job I run to monitor the health of one of the systems I'm developing; it uses a week of CPU time but runs for only a few minutes of real time. "