Recovery Oriented Computing: A New Research Agenda for a New Century David A. Patterson, Pardee Chair of Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley Abstract

After 15 years of successfully improving cost-performance, it's time for new challenges for the systems research community.

As a result of the focus on cost-performance, the fabled five 9s of availability (99.999% uptime) looks to be much easier to achieve in advertising than in computers, and the cost of managing systems can be five times the cost of the hardware. In a PostPC Era of wireless gadgets using services on the Internet, one new challenge is building services that really are dependable and much less expensive to maintain.

Traditional Fault Tolerant Computing concentrates on tolerating hardware and operating system faults, ignoring faults by human operators and even applications. Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) aims at improving Mean Time To Recover to both lower the cost of management and improve at the availability of whole system, including the people who operate it. We look to civil engineering and diplomacy to inspire principles for ROC design.

This talk outlines motivation for and proposed principles of ROC design, plus some concrete results in the area of benchmarking of availability.

Talk Slides (PPT - local copy , ROC web page.

BIO: David Patterson joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1977, where he now holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of both the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). He led the design and implementation of RISC I, likely the first VLSI Reduced Instruction Set Computer. This research became the foundation of the SPARC architecture, used by Sun Microsystems and others. He was a leader, along with Randy Katz, of the Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks project (or RAID), which led to reliable storage systems from many companies. He is co-author of five books, including two with John Hennessy, who is now President of Stanford University. Patterson has been chair of the CS division at Berkeley, the ACM SIG in computer architecture, and the Computing Research Association.

His teaching has been honored by the ACM, the IEEE, and the University of California. Patterson shared the 1999 IEEE Reynold Johnson Information Storage Award with Randy Katz for the development of RAID and shared the 2000 IEEE von Neumann medal with John Hennessy for "creating a revolution in computer architecture through their exploration, popularization, and commercialization of architectural innovations."