I am really pleased to welcome you all to "Leaders in Big

Data" hosted by Google and the Fung Institute of Engineering

Leadership at UC Berkeley.

I'm Lee Fleming.

I'm director of the Institute and this is a Ikhlaq Sidhu,

chief scientist and co-founder.

The first and most important thing is to thank Google for

hosting the event.

So thank you very, very much.

There's a couple people in particular, Irena Coffman and

Gail Hernandez--

thank you-- and also Arnav Anant, our entrepreneur in

residence at the Fung Institute.

So here's Arnav.

AUDIENCE: A lot of work.

LEE FLEMING: Huge amount of work.

The Fung Institute-- we were founded about two years ago.

And the intent is to do research and pedagogical

development in topics of engineering leadership.

We have our degree, the Master's of Engineering--

professional Master's of Engineering M. Eng. program--

mainly around the Institute.

We also have ties though across the campus, as you'll

see shortly.

This is our intent to have a series of talks on topics of

interest to engineering leaders.

As it turns out, this Wednesday we

have our next talk.

It's sponsored by [? Thai ?] and the Fung Institute.

And the topic is entrepreneurship--

being an entrepreneur within your firm.

And fittingly, we have representatives from Google,

and Cisco, and SAP.

That's Wednesday.

Consult the Fung website or the [? Thai ?] website for

details on that.

So besides enjoying a good discussion tonight, we have an

ulterior motive, as you can probably tell.

We're trying to advertise all of our fantastic programs in

big data at Cal.

Now, whether you're interested in computation, or inference,

or application, or some combination of those things,

we've got the right program for you.

As I mentioned, the professional Masters of

Engineering, or M. Eng., across all the different

engineering departments--

one year degree.

We have another one-year degree in the stats

department-- a professional degree.

There's a two-year degree in the Information School.

And finally, there's the Haas MBA.

Tonight we've got people from all these programs.

You can find their tables, ask them questions, and hopefully

we'll see you see at Cal soon.

And we also have an additional executive and other programs

associated with each of those departments

and schools as well.

Ikhlaq will now introduce our speakers.

IKHLAQ SIDHU: OK, thanks.

So let me see.

LEE FLEMING: Just slide this here.

IKHLAQ SIDHU: All right.

Welcome, I want to also thank a couple of people.

One is [? Claus Nickoli ?], who is not here at the moment,

but to you in the ether, he's just not at the meeting.

But he's our host here, and so thank you.

You guys can tell him that I thanked him.

And also, many of you I've seen here are basically

friends, and so thanks for coming.

It's good to see you again.

This is an event on big data.

And so I'm going to give you a little data on

who is speaking today--

who is here.

And the way I think of this is, what we've got is three

perspectives of big data from leading firms--

from people who represent leading firms in the area.

And so let's start with NetApp.

We've got Gustav Horn.

He is a senior consulting engineer with 25 years of

experience.

And he's built some of the largest enterprise-class

Hadoop systems in the world-- on the planet.

And from Google, Theodore Vassilakis, and he's a

principal engineer at Google.

He's ahead of the team that works on data analytics.

And he's been responsible for numerous contributions to

Google in terms [? about ?] search, and the visualization

and representation of the results.

And from VMware, Charles Fan, who's senior VP of strategic

R&D. He co-founded Rainfinity and was CTO of the company

prior to its acquisition by EMC in 2005.

And our distinguished set of speakers is moderated by our

distinguished moderator, Hal Varian.

He is chief economist here at Google.

He's an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and the founding

dean of the School of Information.

So with that, there's hardly anything more I

could possibly say.

Come on up Hal and take it away.

HAL VARIAN: Thank you.

I'm very impressed with the turnout tonight, seeing as

you're missing both the debate and the baseball game.

But at least it eliminates a difficult

choice for many people.

I will say that I'm going to follow the same rules as the

presidential debates.

So no kicking, biting, scratching, or bean balls are

allowed during this performance.

We're going to talk about foreign policy, wasn't that

the agreement?

No.

All right.

In any event, what I thought we'd would do is, we'd have

each person talk for about five minutes, lay out their

theme, where they're coming from, what their perspective

is on big data.

And I will take some notes, and then ask some questions,

get a conversation going.

And I think we'll have a little time at the end for

some questions from the floor.

So, take it away.

THEO VASSILAKIS: Sure.

So, should I start, Hal?

HAL VARIAN: Yes.

THEO VASSILAKIS: All right.

Well, hey it's a real pleasure to be here.

Thank you guys also, and thank you guys for coming.

It's a huge, huge audience.

Just a couple of words.

As you heard, my name is Theo.

I lead some of our analytical systems.

So I'm responsible--

well, actually up until two weeks ago, I was responsible

for a stack that had parallel data warehousing components,

query engines, pieces like Dremel, and Tenzing systems

that let you query this data, and

visualization layers on top.

And that's one of the many, many systems at Google that I

think, outside, one would think of as

big-data type of systems.

And so I'll try to give you my perspective at least on the

Google view of big data.

And hopefully someone will cut me off when it's time.

I think I'll probably go for five minutes.

This could take a while.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

THEO VASSILAKIS: All right, sounds good.

Thank you.

I think, as you guys know, Google's business is primarily

about taking data and organizing the world's

information, and making it universally

accessible and useful.

So a lot of what the company does is really about sucking

in data-- whether it be the web, whether it be the imagery

from Street View, or satellite imagery, or maps information,

or Android pings, or you name it.

And then transforming it into usable forms.

So really, Google is kind of a big data

machine in some sense.

And I think the term big data came into

currency relatively recently.

And we all said, yeah, OK, that speaks to what we do.

Because we don't really have a word for it.

We just kind of knew that the data was large.

But just to try to put maybe more structure on to that, I

think the Google view on a lot of "what is big data

processing" kind of splits up into probably what I would

call ingestion type of processes--

things like the crawlers, things like all those Street

View cars running through all the streets of the world.

And then goes into transaction processing systems, where

perhaps we capture data through interactions on a lot

of our web properties, or a lot of the web properties that

we partner with.

This means people clicking on search, or people interacting

with docs, or people interacting with maps.

All generate many, many clicks and many, many interactions

that then become transactional big data.

Of course, that also includes people using let's say Google

Analytics on their sites to measure traffic on their

properties, which then generates huge volumes of

pings into Google--

many tens of thousands of QPS of pings.

So that's kind of the second big component.

And then probably the third component is the processing

side of all of that.

The process side includes things like map [? reduce, ?]

analysis, generating insights from that data--

maybe in the form of building machine learning models.

Maybe in the form of building, for example, Zeitgeist top

queries that can then be served out to the world to

say, hey here is what people are searching for.

Maybe in the form of engrams of all the books that Google

scanned over many, many years of its ingestion processes.

But it's really baking all of that information and then

presenting it in some usable form, either through a system

such as our ad system that takes models and decides what

ads to show, or in a more direct

form such as the engrams.

Just to say, OK, here are those three broad classes--

ingestion, transaction processing, and analytical

processing.

To dig a little bit deeper into each of those areas, I

would say the ingestion processes, especially the very

large scale ingestion processes, are

highly custom systems.

If you think about our web crawlers, if you think about

the Street View cars, if you think about maps stitching, or

satellite imagery stitching--

those are very, very custom processes that I think, at

least to this date, don't have a clear analog

in the general industry.

And maybe this is something that you guys might address or

might see differently than how I see the version.

They're still highly-specialized systems

that produce very large images.

And they're very high performance, very complex

systems that are run by dedicated engineering teams.

The transaction processing systems or the storage systems

are things like the Google File System.

These are things like Big Table.

These are things like Megastore.

Those are the ones that we've actually published papers

about and that are now reasonably well

known in the industry--

have evolved a little bit past the purely custom stage, where

they're fairly general purpose.

And there was a time at Google where actually most people did

their own storage in some form or another, until these

GFS-like systems evolved to the point where they were good

enough that more than one team could use them.

And actually, that evolution had many steps in which, for

example, everybody ran their own GFS.

And so maybe the ads team had their own GFS cells, and the

search team maybe had their own GFS cells.

And in time, the systems matured to the point where

actually we could have a centrally-managed file system.

And I think recently you may have seen, we've now talked

about this global file system called Spanner which takes

that to yet another level of transactions and global

availability.

And then the third step, which is I think still in a

relatively immature stage compared to some of the

storage systems, is the analysis.

And I think a lot of people know about MapReduce and some

of the systems that have been built on top of that.