Farewell to a Gentleman and Computer Scholar

By Doug Barney

A year or so ago I wrote a couple of feature stories about Microsoft Research. The $6 billion a year research organization works with top scientists and academics from around the world to try and solve our biggest problems, global warming, disease, population growth, famine, etc. Here are links to those stories: http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?EditorialsID=657 and http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?EditorialsID=657.

These weren’t just feel good stories (though at times they felt darn good), but examined how high-end technologies, clustering, data mining, intelligent distributed sensors, and new parallel programming paradigms, can be harnessed by scientists.

Along the way I kept hearing about a gentleman named Jim Gray. I promised I would make time to interview Jim, but the crush of deadlines made this promise easy to forget. I never made the call.

When not working on ways to build supercomputers out of cheap, off-the-shelf parts, Gray found time to help build a worldwide telescope, one that aggregates and organizes data from scopes around the world. The so-called Large Synoptic Survey Telescope can collect petabytes of data every year.

Gray applied the same thing to good old terra firma, helping build the TerraServer, a massive database of geological images now used by the US Geological Survey.

Finally Gray used his database and data mining know-how to help find signs of cancer in the early stages when it’s still treatable.

On January 28, 2007 Gray, an accomplished sailor, set off to spread his mother’s ashes off the coast of California. Gray and his boat disappeared, and now more than a year later friends now accept that he is gone.

The University of California Berkeley is hosting a tribute on May 31. This is the kind of event I’m sure Gray would like. After a general session, the rest of the day is spent talking about hard core computing issues, such as transaction processing and taking a look at some of Gray’s most groundbreaking projects.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/IPRO/JimGrayTribute/

Gray’s