What the Heck is Cliff Up To?

"In other words: we got plenty of unreliable CPU, memory, disk & network… but we can’t get at with the same ease the hardware guys made possible when going to dram from multiple CPUs connected over internal buses. Until we break that ease-of-use barrier, we’ll never get every-day programmers coding distributed systems as easily as we do single machines now."

Isn't that the problem that MapReduce/BigTable/etc. are already solving?

And if the problem you're trying to solve is making distributed systems like MapReduce/BigTable themselves as easy to code as single-machine systems, I strongly believe that will never be possible. Distributed systems are far more complex and have failure modes that don't exist in single-machine systems. Trying to hide that would only give you a horribly leaky abstraction.

The github repo for 0xdata's new "h2o" database is still empty, but there's another interesting project containing highly concurrent in-memory java data structures: https://github.com/0xdata/high-scale-lib

Here's a talk that Cliff gave a while back about writing a lock free hashmap: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2139967204534450862

Somehow I always thought Azul was Cliff Click's startup.