HPTS'24 Day 1, part 1
Wow, what a week that was! The two days of HPTS (Monday and Tuesday this week) felt like a week to me. I learned a lot, and had a lot of good conversations, and even was able to squeeze in some beach walks in there.
HPTS has been operating since 1985, convenening mostly every two years. It has been described as Davos for database systems. Pat Helland has been running HPTS since 1989, and as usual he kicked it off with some short opening remarks 8:30am Monday morning.
Pat reminisced on the early HPTSs which discussed cutting edge work on scalable computing, punching past 100 txn on a mainframe! Then he quickly set the context of the workshop. This event is about meeting people. There are 130 people, with 20+ of them students. He said "your job is to meet everyone, HPTS is about the connections you make". The HPTS website also emphasizes this. "HPTS is about the breaks. The presentations punctuate the breaks! HPTS exists to promote community and relationships. This community comprises people that share a common interest in scalable systems and all their challenges. We emphasize discussion during breaks and deliberately seek out presentations that spark thought-provoking controversy."
Srinivas is the VP of engineering at OpenAI. He has been the responsible person on the technical side of products, such as chatgpt. He is a former database person from IBM Almaden and U Wisconsin.
