Paris Hilton on 96-Bit Search Architectures

paris n lollipop
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Paris was over at Federated Media talking to Gary Flake, a now Microsoft 64 bit search supremo. Paris' eyes were glazing over, not from the lollipop, because she was so 96 bit herself. Battelle : "First, all search architectures tier their data stores so that the data can reside on relatively slow disks or fast RAM. For performance purposes, you want the most frequently accessed data to be on the fastest store (RAM). A 64 bit system can have vastly more RAM than a 32 bit system, which means that we can have a higher ratio of RAM to disk space (per CPU), versus others in the industry. Second, we've only scratched the surface on the possibilities for using advanced hyperlink analysis for web relevance. There are a class of algorithms (like Pagerank) that work well in either 32 or 64 bit systems (technically, because the algorithms can be realized via a linear sweep of hyperlinks). However, there is an even richer class of algorithms that can only be efficiently built on a 64 bit system because you essentially have to have a significant part of the web stored close to a single CPU. So, 64 bit systems pave the way for entirely new forms of relevance that look at how pages relate to one another. Finally, with the bigger address space, we may also see 64 bit systems critical to realizing more sophisticated relevance algorithms that analyze a result set in the aggregate as a final step. In this scenario, you may have a huge amount of data in memory, which 64 bit systems can do just fine. So, in short, it's a real big deal and it will be more important as the entire industry matures."