I’m increasingly believing my own story that data-centric programming is the future of parallel computing at the high end. I’m starting to hear it echoed back at me from real people.
I attended the Greenplum customer advisory board meeting this week, including a public briefing in San Francisco for analysts and potential customers. The Greenplum folks asked me to speak at the briefing about parallelism and analytics in the large, outside the scope of Greenplum per se. I cooked up a little slide deck for the occasion on why and whither parallelism and analytics. A familiar story about how the future is parallel, and the practical future is dataflow parallelism. (Familiar yes, but with some nice Flickr clip-art and approachable analogies to explain it.)
The big aha moment occured for me during our panel discussion, which included Luke Lonergan from Greenplum, Roger Magoulas from O’Reilly, and Brian Dolan from Fox Interactive Media (which runs MySpace among other web properties).