Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
doc.cat-v.org
Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#2I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#3HTML version: https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#4I think "systems engineering" has won out over "systems research" - optimizing existing systems instead of creating new ones. Part of it is that we are constrained by our hardware, which forces us into specific paradigms; but I think also systems end up becoming fungible and it a point it doesn't really matter what RPC protocol you use - just that it's fast.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#5I think "systems engineering" has won out over "systems research" - optimizing existing systems instead of creating new ones. Part of it is that we are constrained by our hardware, which forces us into specific paradigms; but I think also systems end up becoming fungible and it a point it doesn't really matter what RPC protocol you use - just that it's fast.
While true we are hardware bound, it’s pretty apparently we are not fully utilizing the hardware all the time. That gap is what research needs to close
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#6I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
Huh? My team isn’t pushing the state of the art by any means, and I have about 6 guys running about 40k hosts globally and they are more secure, better configured, etc than the work I did 20 years ago. Then, I worked with a few hundred Unix systems as part of a team of like 40.
Systems and storage has advanced significantly.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#7I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
Computer science may be stagnant, but practical applications of topics researched decades ago has flourished from small seeds into large forests.
I am pretty sure that all research on stuff we are since the horizontal scaling has taken over have been researched 4+ decades ago and is only now is widely used... though when I looked, the CAP theorem is from 1998, so maybe not.
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#8I think that the intervening 22 years have proved this correct. Just like aeronautics and materials science, computer science seems to have stagnated.
Computer science may be stagnant, but practical applications of topics researched decades ago has flourished from small seeds into large forests. I am pretty sure that all research on stuff we are since the horizontal scaling has taken over have been researched 4+ decades ago and is only now is widely used... though when I looked, the CAP theorem is from 1998, so maybe not.
CAP:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
2 of 3 for Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#9He's not wrong. Computer research is so irrelevant that I haven't ready much of it in decades. The things that do bubble up are theoretical security problems that really won't move the needle.
I mean, TCP/IP won, but that doesn't mean that it's the best. It's not even close. Same with the current CPU architectures; the work, they can scale, but still.
The chips today can solve certain kinds of problems really well. Is the scope our problems are limited by what the chips can do? Or does it seem that way because they're so general-purpose that they can handle any kind of problem?
Re: Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (2000) [pdf]
#10In the 2000s we spoke about distributed operating systems (Inferno, etc.). That's where systems research seemed to be headed, yet that never really took off. But maybe we're revisiting the concept now, just coming down from the layer above (e.g. application data types) instead of trying to rethink the OS.
I work on this [1], it kinda looks like systems software, and it doesn't feel stagnant. But then, nobody uses it (yet - I hope).
And there's a plethora of similar ideas (DAT, OrbitDB, etc.).