It seems the paper was published around 2010-2011. This is Martin Kersten, same guy who did MonetDB. I'm not sure if the idea went anywhere since it was very ra

It seems the paper was published around 2010-2011. This is Martin Kersten, same guy who did MonetDB. I'm not sure if the idea went anywhere since it was very radical and wacky, but perhaps it's waiting for its time to come :-) The neat thing about it isn't that it /can/ work in such an architecture, it's more that it's optimized to leverage it. Their idea is that you can spin data through the ring one way, and spin requests the other way, and you can have a multi-node distributed data system while avoiding a ton of global coordination. > you could theoretically increase your energy efficiency by 50% if you could leave idle machines powered off and effectively bring them on line quickly enough to meet your design goals It's a cool pattern that I keep seeing of people trying similar ideas at different scales! Multicore processors for mobile computers also turn cores on and off to save power, and migrate and balance processes across cores, I believe. Similarly, the process migration thing could be solved at the language level rather than the OS level, which I think is what some erlang stuff does - as long as you have global coordination and can serialize process state and code, why not?