ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC)

Papers are being solicited for the ACM’s new symposium on cloud computing (SOCC) — and they’re due pretty soon, January 15. Both research and industrial papers are welcome. The folks involved (present company excepted) are really strong, and we expect to have some very interesting invited speakers as well. Interesting enough to entice folks to Indianapolis!

The best parts of these smaller symposia are the give-and-take of people in the room talking about each other’s work. So send in your best ideas and plan to come.

More info including the call for papers at http://research.microsoft.com/socc2010

The Cloud Goes BOOM: First Strike

For the last year or so, my team at Berkeley — in collaboration with Yahoo Research — has been undertaking an aggressive experiment in programming.  The challenge is to design a radically easier programming model for infrastructure and applications in the next computing platform: The Cloud.  We call this the Berkeley Orders Of Magnitude (BOOM) project: enabling programmers to develop OOM bigger systems in OOM less code.

To kick this off we built something we call BOOM Analytics [link updated to new version]: a clone of Hadoop and HDFS built largely in Overlog, a declarative language we developed some years back for network protocols.  BOOM Analytics is just as fast and scalable as Hadoop, but radically simpler in its structure.  As a result we were able — with amazingly little effort — to turbocharge our incarnation of the elephant with features that would be enormous upgrades to Hadoop’s Java codebase.  Two of the fanciest are: