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From: pha@caen.engin.umich.edu (Paul H. Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Extremely Fast Filesystems
Message-ID: <1990Aug7.190719.7907@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 90 19:07:19 GMT
References: <13285@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <30728@super.ORG> <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com>
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Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
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In article <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com> jesup@cbmvax (Randell Jesup) writes:
>
> (discussion about mapping 4G+ files in workstations deleted)
>
>	I submit that your situation is something of an unusual case, and is
>likely to remain unusual for at least a decade, perhaps 2.  Few machines
>(percentage-wise) even have 4 GB of storage, let alone files larger that 4GB
>(I've never even seen a file larger than 100MB, even on mainframes).
>
>	Eventually, perhaps, but not in the near future.  There are people
>who have greater needs, that's the whole justification for the selling of
>supercomputers, and the vastly expensive (read fast & large) IO systems that
>support them.  But they're a tiny minority, numbers-wise.  Until the
>number of people that require such things increases sufficiently, the only
>architectures to support the extra address bits will be the super-(and maybe
>mini-super-)computers.  Those extra address bits are _not_ free, in silicon,
>memory, etc.  (I hope we haven't started the 32+ addr bit rwars again...)
>

In order to make computers very useful to social scientists, for studies
of econometric or populations data, large data sets will be the norm.

Populations Studies Center, for example, would like nothing better than to
quickly analyze 5 gigabyte datasets (hence my earlier request for large
RAM systems).  Furthermore, many such datasets exist.  The 1990 census
is just one 5 gigabyte file - there are similar files for the last
100 years or more.  Likewise for China, Russia, Europe, and more.

Analyzing these things quickly is not currently very easy, but that
doesn't mean that people don't want to do it.

The demand is there now for computer systems that can deal with these
problems.  It may be some time before the demand and the cost for
meeting that demand meet, but make no mistake, the demand is there
right now!

Paul Anderson
University of Michigan