Angelo begins this episode with the predictions of Moore’s Law. In the early years, systems were restricted based on the CPUs ability to keep up. As the CPUs continued to advance, the bottlenecks ended up around data movement. Data movement of information from disc to memory and memory to cache become the big bottlenecks. Then of course, disks got faster and eventually you'd have so much RAM on a machine that it was just memory movement inside of RAM. Eventually, we believe the bottleneck will return to the CPU.
Quantum computing is on the rise—that, we believe, is a game changer for Moore’s Law. Because we're no longer talking about conventional computer chips and transistors, instead we're talking about something completely different.
Additionally, as machine learning and artificial intelligence systems make advancements, or like Angelo’s thesis using AI to tune data systems, the advancement of speed and acceleration will be impactful in order of magnitude from traditional systems.
Talent and staffing will also change as we adapt to the future. Angelo admires Google’s practices of hiring ability over experience because the problems we face tomorrow are different than today. The key thing is to be able to independently make progress because there isn't much room for babysitting. It's too hard to predict where the next fire will be. Angelo explains further why he hires ability over experience every single time, because it is true, someone who has ability, someone who's brilliant and has the hunger to learn new things can be programmed like a stem cell. They can just inject themselves into whatever problem they might have.
Angelo transitions into his own personal story and his quest for fulfillment and happiness. He introduces a personal story of a boy who was dying during the Nazi occupied island in Chios, Greece. A doctor took pity on this boy and secretly nursed him to health. We later learn that this boy is Angelo’s father. Angelo shares, “My father grew up in a world much different than mine. His siblings related stories of famine and suffering, but he never ever spoke of those things. What he chose to relate were accounts of human triumph, perseverance, hope, aspiration. The sea was his salvation, carrying him from Chios as a sailor, eventually to the United States.”
So, what is our true potential? Intellectual achievements can be ignored or forgotten. But to be a successful family person, a husband, a father, a human, Angelo needed to be something more, something enduring.
Education builds the qualities of perseverance, hard work, and accomplishment. There is no doubt you'll accomplish many things, but think about what it is that you're really trying to do. You see, building technical solutions isn't just about doing interesting stuff. Ultimately we're building these things for a reason. We're building technology. For example, if you're doing a healthcare application, it's going to touch somebody's life. That's the point of this breakthrough, right? You want to increase throughput, for example, in decision support, something Angelo spends a lot of time on. We want to say, increase throughput, build a system that can compute faster and bigger sets of data. Why are we doing that? Just because of the challenge of the data? No, we want to find out if a clinical intervention is working so that we can feed that information forward to those making the guidelines.
You see, that's the real reason behind doing this. The great resignation has shown us that people care more about what it is they're doing and why they're doing it than just simply being interesting work. We owe it to our family to use our gifts, talents, and opportunities to the best of our ability, but to use them on something that matters.
Angelo is really excited that we're going to have interesting conversations around things like the universe, data centers, energy and how they work. There's a reason the hard problem exists. Don't fixate on the fact that it's a problem. Although there is joy in having a problem and solving it.
We're trying something a little bit new this season and we would love to hear which kinds of episodes you like most. Do you like interviews or do you like some of the educational discussional episodes?
We're going to start a YouTube channel to help deep dive on topics like LSM Trees or RocksDB which are better served with diagrams than with just voice. Seeing the math for yourself or seeing the way that they operate for yourself on video is much more helpful. We're going to have supplementary content, bonus material that you can find on our YouTube channel, and we'll also have some bonus podcast episodes. We look forward to your feedback. Tell us what you like about the show, which topics you prefer, and what you wish we would dive a little deeper on. And we'll really try to do that.
Citations
Gordon Moore, Co-Founder of Intel
Heisenberg, Uncertainty Principle
Powell, James. (2008). The Quantum Limit to Moore's Law. Proceedings of the IEEE. 96. 1247 - 1248. 10.1109/JPROC.2008.925411.
Merritt, Rick. (2013). Moore’s Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says of EETimes
Atomic Hire (2019)
Further Reading
Moore’s Law Ending
Work and Culture at Google
Google Strategy to Hire
About the Host
Angelo Kastroulis is an award-winning technologist, inventor, entrepreneur, speaker, data scientist, and author best known for his high-performance computing and Health IT experience. He is the principal consultant, lead architect, and owner of Carrera Group, a consulting firm specializing in software modernization, event streaming (Kafka), big data, analytics (Spark, elastic Search, and Graph), and high-performance software development on many technical stacks (Java, .net, Scala, C++, and Rust). A Data Scientist at heart, trained at the Harvard Data Systems Lab, Angelo enjoys a research-driven approach to creating powerful, massively scalable applications and innovating new methods for superior performance. He loves to educate, discover, then see the knowledge through to practical implementation.
Host: Angelo Kastroulis
Executive Producer: Náture Kastroulis
Producer: Albert Perrotta;
Communications Strategist: Albert Perrotta;
Audio Engineer: Ryan Thompson
Music: All Things Grow by Oliver Worth
Host: Angelo Kastroulis
Executive Producer: Náture Kastroulis
Producer: Albert Perrotta
Communications Strategist: Albert Perrotta
Video/Audio Engineer: Ryan Thompson
Music: All Things Grow by Oliver Worth
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