Rob Pike
Google
Thursday, April 21, 1005
1131 Kemper Hall
3 :10-4:00 p.m.
Google has large amounts of data -- to index the Web, you need to have an addressable copy of it -- and many custom tools designed to operate at that scale. One of those tools is a special-purpose language for distributed data processing. I will describe that language, including its unusual model and implementation, starting from the point of view of my long-term interest in concurrent programming.
Bio:
Rob Pike, well known for his appearances on "Late Night with David
Letterman," has been a member of the Systems Lab at Google, Inc.,
since 2002. For countless years he toiled as a Member of the Technical
Staff at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1981 he wrote
the first bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has since written
ten more. He was a principal designer and implementer of the Plan 9 and
Inferno operating systems. With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal;
with Brian Kernighan he wrote `The Unix Programming Environment' and `The
Practice of Programming'. A shuttle mission nearly launched a gamma-ray
telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen and has never written
a program that uses cursor addressing.