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Rob is way smarter than I am but maybe this opportunity just doesn't exist any more. How much is there to be done in systems research that has a chance of influ

Rob is way smarter than I am but maybe this opportunity just doesn't exist any more. How much is there to be done in systems research that has a chance of influencing the industry but isn't just another layer of abstraction on top of existing well agreed upon standards?

adrianN 8y ago
A lot, I hope. We're entering a time where chip fabrication tech is commodicized. That's an opportunity for new architectures. Further up the stack there are a lot more inefficiencies that can be removed. In my laptop here is a CPU that can do more than two billion operations per second, but it struggles to render many websites. What we have now can't be the end-all of system's software.
cryptonector 8y ago
There is a never-ending amount of work to do in systems research.
toast0 8y ago
I took this as his key point: > Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software. Although, from the rest of the slides, he also laments a lack of research, he is (was?) disappointed that research didn't end up in the market like it used to. I've certainly read papers that claim to solve a problem I have, but been unable to apply them, because I really need software and not a paper (or because the software works for exactly the example data and nothing else). Research that produces another layer of abstraction is unlikely to be super useful. Research that produces different layers might be. Rob wanted to see whole operating systems and cool demos, but I'm happy to see things like data structure and locking changes in tcp stacks that allow for significantly better multicore performance. (That's unfortunately likely to go away with MPTCP or QUIC style TCP over multiple in time UDP sockets --- making that perform well is a good target of research too)

adrianN 8y ago

A lot, I hope. We're entering a time where chip fabrication tech is commodicized. That's an opportunity for new architectures. Further up the stack there are a lot more inefficiencies that can be removed. In my laptop here is a CPU that can do more than two billion operations per second, but it struggles to render many websites. What we have now can't be the end-all of system's software.

cryptonector 8y ago

There is a never-ending amount of work to do in systems research.

toast0 8y ago

I took this as his key point: > Instead, we see a thriving software industry that largely ignores research, and a research community that writes papers rather than software. Although, from the rest of the slides, he also laments a lack of research, he is (was?) disappointed that research didn't end up in the market like it used to. I've certainly read papers that claim to solve a problem I have, but been unable to apply them, because I really need software and not a paper (or because the software works for exactly the example data and nothing else). Research that produces another layer of abstraction is unlikely to be super useful. Research that produces different layers might be. Rob wanted to see whole operating systems and cool demos, but I'm happy to see things like data structure and locking changes in tcp stacks that allow for significantly better multicore performance. (That's unfortunately likely to go away with MPTCP or QUIC style TCP over multiple in time UDP sockets --- making that perform well is a good target of research too)