“MapReduce”: The Compression of Space and Time

Chapter Eight: “MapReduce”: The Compression of Space and Time In which we learn what networks are really, rather wonderfully, meant for. 1. Starting in the springtime of 1997, the American scientist and inventor Danny Hillis began what has since become an every-few-months sort of ritual. He packed up from his home in Encino, a short drive over the Hollywood Hills from Los Angeles, and headed off for rural Texas for a few days that would largely defined by rock and dynamite. Hillis, who was born in 1956, has spent most of his life working at the electron level of the world, crafting some of the most significant computer processing systems of our age. So the sort of paleolithinc earth moving he was heading off to manage in Texas was a departure from his usual scale. His aim was to work on blasting and then refining a space in an isolated mountainside for the construction of a towering clock that he had designed, one intended to run for 10,000 years. That ten-millennia span was not accidentally chosen. Humans, when Hillis began his work on the clock, had been around about that long already. We were, as he pictured it, ata midpoint on that 20,000 year stretch of time. Hillis and the group of tinkerers, thinkers, and engineers who had backed and designed the clock - people such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, spreadsheet inventor Mitch Kapor or investor Esther Dyson - were planning on a project that would stretch as close to eternity as they felt reasonable. “The Clock of the Long Now” they called it. I remember pulling into Danny’s driveway in Encino one afternoon as he prepared to depart for Texas and being struck by the contrast between the lovely, innofensive suburban blandness of Southern California and the tools he was taking with him to make an assault not merely on a mountain, but on a whole conception of time. | had met Hillis in an unusual fashion. I’d been asked to chair a committee that would award a million dollars to a figure who had made an essential contribution in the world of technology. The directors of the foundation behind the then-new prize had been, from the start, slyly dropping big names - Bill Gates! Steve Jobs! They hoped such a laureate would cast a bit of glamour on the first year of their award for “Contributions to Man’s Present Condition.” But when our committee sat down to talk it over, we knew that the boldfaced names didn’t want or need a prize. They certainly didn’t need a million dollars. As we considered people we all knew who’d made fundamental, essential contributions but had not been as boldfaced as they might have been, Danny Hillis’s name came up immediately. Hillis had developed a revolutionary “massively parallel” computer in the 1980s. The machine had helped create an entire discipline of high-speed computing by tying together tens of thousands of processors to tackle a problem at once. Traditional computers worked problems the way you or I might, step by step. Hillis’ design was the equivalent of millions of minds, all moving at once. Coordinated, connected and awesomely fast. In the years since, he’d played a key role in a dozen 127 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018359