This morning, Sir Richard Branson went to space. Virgin Galactic did an impressive job, and the flight went off without a hitch, but this article isn’t about that; it concerns the much more significant threat our space travel poses. Our species is advancing technologically forward at an unprecedented rate, and…

An open letter to the college chancellors across the country. I was brought up with the belief that educators and academics were always a little smarter and wiser than the rest of us. During the last few months, that philosophy has been shattered! With the US Covid-19 death toll passing…

Two weeks ago an executive I report to mentioned that they were going to post a leader board composed of peoples self reported Linkedin Social Selling Index (SSI) scores. As one of Linkedin’s first million users, you’d have thought I’d heard of this by now, but I hadn’t. Score are…

For nearly a decade and a half, Myricom, a hot tech startup at the turn of the Millenium, measured success not by profitability, but by the percentage of the Top500 running its flagship Myrinet interconnect. Sure, we had to be profitable, but the CEO/founder was laser-focused on the penetration of…

Establishing a world record is one way of saying, “This is the best we can do as humans; now, let’s all try to beat it.” From Baseball, and the Guinness Book to the Olympics and Track and Field, we are continually striving to lift more, jump higher, or move faster…

Many applications from biological to financial and Web2.0 utilize in-memory databases because of their cutting-edge performance, often delivering several orders of magnitude faster response time than traditional relational databases. When these in-memory databases are moved to their own machines in a multi-tier application environment, they often can serve 10 million…

As system architects, we seriously contemplate and research the components to include in our next server deployment. First, we break the problem being solved into its essential parts; then, we size the components necessary to address each element. Is the problem compute, memory, or storage-intensive? How much of each element…

A distinctive characteristic of our species, perhaps the most unique, and the one that has separated us from all the others, is the compounding effect of our technology. Each generation has added to our collective knowledge, improved our processes, and accelerated our development. Today we regularly craft complex products, with…

Yesterday during one of my many calls each week with my seventy-something mom, she mentioned that she might pass on going to her close friend’s 80th birthday party. When I asked why she said that the four and a half-hour drive up the Florida Turnpike was becoming too scary, she…