Locality and the Fast File System

CSC 213 - Operating Systems and Parallel Algorithms - Weinman



Answer the following questions. Record your answers in your Reading Journal.
  1. In 2008, the flagship magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, Communications, published a tribute to Turing award winning computer scientist Jim Gray:
    Astronomy data has doubled in size every year for the past 20 years, due mostly to the emergence of electronic sensors. The largest sky survey of the past decade, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS (www.sdss.org), is often called the cosmic genome project. When it began in 1992, the size of the data set to be used for scientific analysis was measured in terabytes, shockingly large for the time. ...
    Jim Gray worked with astronomers for more than a decade, right up to the time he went missing in 2007. My [author Szalay's] collaboration with him [Gray] created some of the worlds largest astronomy databases and enabled us to test many unorthodox data-management ideas in practice. ...
    Jim ... came ... to look over our computer room and within 30 seconds declared, with a grin, we had the wrong database layout. My colleagues and I were stunned. Jim explained later that he listened to the sounds the machines were making as they operated; the disks rattled too much, telling him there was too much random disk access (Szalay, 2008, p. 59).
    -Alexander S. Szalay, (2008). "Jim Gray, Astronomer", Communications of the ACM 51(11):59-65.
    Identify the sentence from today's reading that is most closely related. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain whether your selection supports, contradicts, or complicates Szalay's story.
  2. Identify the sentence from today's reading that you feel best illustrates the single most important contribution of the fast file system. Briefly (3-5 sentences) explain your selection.
  3. Identify (and briefly elaborate on) the paragraph from today's reading that remains the most confusing to you. Select the most important, confusing sentence from the passage, underline each of the key words, and give your brief definition of each key word.