Gordon Bell

MyLifeBits: fulfilling the Memex vision

MyLifeBits is a project to fulfill the Memex vision first posited by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It is a system for storing all of ones digital media, including documents, images, sounds, and videos. It is built on four principles: (1) collections and search must replace hierarchy for organization (2) many visualizations should be supported (3) annotations are critical to non-text media and must be made easy, and (4) authoring should be via transclusion.

MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything

Developing a platform for recording, storing, and accessing a personal lifetime archive.

Beyond the Data Deluge

The demands of data-intensive science represent a challenge for diverse scientific communities.

Passive capture and ensuing issues for a personal lifetime store

Passive capture lets people record their experiences without having to operate recording equipment, and without even having to give recording conscious thought. The advantages are increased capture, and improved participation in the event itself. However, passive capture also presents many new challenges. One key challenge is how to deal with the increased volume of media for retrieval, browsing, and organizing. This paper describes the SenseCam device, which combines a camera with a number of sensors in a pendant worn around the neck. Data from SenseCam is uploaded into a MyLifeBits repository, where a number of features, but especially correlation and relationships, are used to manage the data.

Petascale computational systems

A balanced cyberinfrastructure is necessary to meet growing data-intensitive scientific needs. We believe that available resources should be allocated to benefit the broadest cross-section of the scientific community. Given the power-law distribution of problem sizes, this means that about half of funding agency resources should be spent on tier-1 centers at the petascale level and the other half dedicated to tier-2 and tier-3 centers on a cost-sharing basis. Funding agencies should support balanced systems, not just CPU farms, as well as petascale IO and networking. They should also allocate resources for a balanced tier-1 through tier-3 cyberinfrastructure.

What's next in high-performance computing?

We can trace the evolution from Crays, to clusters, to supercomputing centers. But where does it go from here?

Low-power amdahl-balanced blades for data intensive computing

Enterprise and scientific data sets double every year, forcing similar growths in storage size and power consumption. As a consequence, current system architectures used to build data warehouses are about to hit a power consumption wall. In this paper we propose an alternative architecture comprising large number of so-called Amdahl blades that combine energy-efficient CPUs with solid state disks to increase sequential read I/O throughput by an order of magnitude while keeping power consumption constant. We also show that while keeping the total cost of ownership constant, Amdahl blades offer five times the throughput of a state-of-theart computing cluster for data-intensive applications. Finally, using the scaling laws originally postulated by Amdahl, we show that systems for data-intensive computing must maintain a balance between low power consumption and per-server throughput to optimize performance perWatt.

The MyLifeBits lifetime store

Storage trends have brought us to the point where it is affordable to keep a complete digital record of ones life, and capture methods are multiplying. To experiment with a lifetime store, we are digitizing everything possible from Gordon Bells life. The MyLifeBits system is designed to store and manage a lifetimes worth of data. MyLifeBits enables the capture of web pages, telephone, radio and television. This demonstration highlights the application of typed links and database features to make a lifetime store something that is truly useful.

GrayWulf: Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data Intensive Computing

Data intensive computing presents a significant challenge for traditional supercomputing architectures that maximize FLOPS since CPU speed has surpassed IO capabilities of HPC systems and BeoWulf clusters. We present the architecture for a three tier commodity component cluster designed for a range of data intensive computations operating on petascale data sets named GrayWulf. The design goal is a balanced system in terms of IO performance and memory size, according to Amdahls Laws. The hardware currently installed at JHU exceeds one petabyte of storage and has 0.5 bytes/sec of I/O and 1 byte of memory for each CPU cycle. The GrayWulf provides almost an order of magnitude better balance than existing systems. The paper covers its architecture and reference applications. The software design is presented in a companion paper.

The revolution yet to happen

By 2047 almost all information will be in cyberspace—including a large percentage of knowledge and creative works. All information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations, will be online. This trend is both desirable and inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderful new ways to inform, entertain, and educate people. The information and the corresponding systems will streamline commerce but will also provide new levels of personal service, health care, and automation. The most significant benefit will be a breakthrough in our ability to communicate remotely with one another using all our senses.