The Darlington Nuclear Generating Station just outside Toronto has four CANDU nuclear reactors with a total output of 3,512 MW. It generates about 20 percent of Ontario’s electricity needs, enough for roughly two million homes. I recently toured the facility on a quick business trip to the area.| Perspectives
The best way to hire great women is to have great women at the top of the company. IBM is a lot stronger for employing Pat Selinger for 29 years . She invented the relational database cost-based optimizer, a technology that sees continued use in relational database management systems today. But more than being a great technologist,...| Perspectives
Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports. Seagate’s Dave Anderson first introduced this to me technology nearly 20 years ago and it’s wonderful to see it delivered to market and the volumes ramping. | Perspectives
I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention of Write Ahead Logging. But constraints also block innovation. In memory databases first described in the 80s remained largely irrelevant for decades waiting for cost effective very large memory servers to make them practical. In this talk I focus mostly on the latter. Constraints that hav...| Perspectives
One of the Amazon Operations teams was hosting a conference for Product Managers in their organization and they asked a few of us to record a 1-minute video of what we each view as important attributes of a Product Panager. My take is below with a link to the video.| Perspectives
It’s been 10 years since those early ideas and, in reflecting on what the team has delivered over this period, I thought it would be fun to walk through some of the history that has led to us deploying more than 20 million AWS designed ASICs. In the video below, I go back to 2012, introduce some of the key players, the early ideas that got us started, the motivation behind those early decisions, what was delivered, and how we continued to grow the semiconductor investments at AWS.| Perspectives
Just after joining Amazon Web Services in 2009, I met with Andrew Certain, at that time a senior engineer on the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) team, to get into the details on how EBS was implemented and what plans were looking forward. Andrew took me through the details of this remote block storage solution and two things were immediately clear to me: 1) there was work yet to be done to address the most demanding workloads, and 2) the overall opportunity for EBS was massive. Having...| Perspectives
Bruce Lindsey Speaking at HPTS 2022High Performance Transactions System (HPTS) is a invitational conference held once every two years at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey California. My first HPTS was back in 1995 thanks to Pat Selinger. I loved it and attended each one up until 2012 when I started a 10 year around-the-world cruise in a small boat. | Perspectives
I introduced the 2022 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering conference on September 21st. The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 is part of The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The NAE operates under the same congressional act of incorporation that established the National Academy of Sciences, signed in 1863 by President Lincoln. Under this charter the NAE is directed “whenever called upon by any department or agency of the go...| Perspectives
Annapurna Labs Graviton3 — Copyright Noah Berger / 2022Today we’re making the AWS Graviton3 processor generally available in the AWS EC2 C7g Instances.| Perspectives