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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

I assume they're talking about the longer history of the distributed systems lab at Berkeley, which was AMP before RISE. (It's actually now Sky Lab[0], each of the labs live for 5 years). AMP notably is the origin of Spark, Mesos, and Tachyon (now Alluxio), and RISE originated Ray.

[0] https://sky.cs.berkeley.edu/

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There is a nice article by David Patterson (who used to direct the lab and won the Turing Award) on why Berkeley changes the name and scope of the lab every five years https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2013/EECS-2013-... . Unfortunately, there's no good name for the lab across each of the five-year boundaries so people just say "rise lab" or "amp lab" etc.

Interesting.

> Good Commandment 3. Thou shalt limit the duration of a center. ...

> To hit home runs, it’s wise to have many at bats. ...

> It’s hard to predict information technology trends much longer than five years. ...

> US Graduate student lifetimes are about five years. ...

> You need a decade after a center finishes to judge if it was a home run. Just 8 of the 12 centers in Table I are old enough, and only 3 of them—RISC, RAID, and the Network of Workstations center—could be considered home runs. If slugging .375 is good, then I’m glad that I had many 5-‐year centers rather than fewer long ones.

(Network of Workstations > Google)

Right .. the AMPLab was set up in 2011. The Djikstra prize for distributed computing was set up in 2006 .. people like Djikstra and Lamport and Jim Gray and Barbara Liskov won Turing Awards for a lifetime's worth of work.

Now, Berkeley has been a fount of research on the topic, no question about that. I myself worked there (on Bloom, with Joe Hellerstein). But forgetting the other top universities of the world is a bit ... amusing?

Let's take one of the many lists of foundational papers of this field:

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/02/foundational-distri...

How many came out of Berkeley, let alone a recent entry like the AMPLab?

You are mischaracterizing my comment, what I said was true. Most distributed systems work (now) has a link back to Berkeley distributed systems labs. Someone wanted context about Hydro (Joe Hellerstein).

I am not going to make every contextualizing comment an authoritative bibliography , you of all people could have added that w/o being snarky and starting this whole subthread.

> Most distributed systems work (now) has a link back to Berkeley distributed systems labs.

I didn't think you were saying that most distributed systems work happening at Berkeley harks back to earlier work at Berkeley. That's a bit obvious.

The only way I can interpret "most distributed systems work now" is a statement about work happening globally. In which case it is a sweeping and false generalization.

Is there another interpretation?

correct

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