On the Road Again with Microsoft Research

Microsoft Research had its annual “Roadshow” event to demo all their new ideas. After the usual introduction in the traditional Klingon style (how big they are, how many battles they’ve won and enemies they’ve killed, and so on), Jim Gray said a few words about “TerraServer”.

TerraServer deals with the issue of large datasets. It is a 20 Terabyte data source (of USGS images) handling 10 million hits per day as a web service. On the insides, it uses commodity X86 servers (surprise – and everyone in 1989 said “port to Alpha, not the X86”, but AlphaBSD didn’t sound as good as 386BSD). Jim’s also looking at astronomical images, which are also pretty big.

But where do I see the big growth? Easy, right in your own digital camera folder.

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