Fundamental advantages of RAMCloud for an application

• Any data access other than local RAM will be faster with RAMCloud (even ~75-85us with SSD)
• Enables very high rates of queries, at least an order of magnitude faster than MySQL per box
  • People have reported O(20,000) for MySQL, probably really basic cached queries
  • More complex will likely be significantly slower, and if anything has to come from disk your of course hosed
• As a consequence of the above, app writers can feel free to write dependent sequential queries if needed and it will still be fast
  • A con to this is to get similar functionality to today you may actually have to write sequential dependent queries
• _Potentially_ no need to name every one of your queries and deal with synchronization when interacting with a cache layer like Memcached
• No performance dependency on locality
• Persistence when compared to memcached
• Easy scalability
• Less complexity than MySQL + Memcached

Lets consider some application categories that run in a datacenter/cloud setting:

• Synthesizing Hardware (Cisco, Nvidia)
  • Cpu bound?
  • Not much disk access?
  • Could it page memory to ramcloud?
• Rendering (Pixar, ILM, Disney)
  • Cpu bound?
  • Dataset may be too large
  • Possible speedup for grabbing textures?
  • Would this help a client machine manipulating the scene?
• Simulation (weather, nuclear)
  • Cpu bound?
  • Any need for shared storage?
• Transactional (stock exchange, banks, credit card processing)
  • Must be a 'to disk' component here including sync, could be a win
  • Online component here, ie fraud detection
• MapReduce, batch processing
  • Could be interesting, depending on the dataset size
  • Is this an existing Pain Point?
  • Could allow the use of 'online' data
• Web related
  • Content Delivery (CDN)
  • Pages requiring many low-locality queries returning small (define) sized data (Facebook, Myspace, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc)
  • Pages requiring many high-locality (or small dataset) queries returning small (define) sized data (CNN, Slashdot)
  • Pages consisting primarily of static content (Microsoft, IMDB, etc)
• Raw Storage

Of the top 20 websites, these could likely largely benefit from RAMCloud

• Google
• Yahoo
• YouTube (not the video part)
• Facebook
• Windows Live
• MSN (how much is static and just cached?)
• Wikipedia (maybe?)
• Blogger.com
• Myspace
• Baidu (Chinese search engine)
• Yahoo Japan
• Google India
• Google Germany
• Google France
• Google UK
• WordPress.com

Concensus built around the following applications:

• Pages requiring many low-locality queries returning small (define) sized data (Facebook, Myspace, Google, Yahoo, Ebay, etc)
• Something in the highly transactional space (visa,paypal,etc) possibly involving live data, ala fraud detection
• MapReduce, where you could run on live data, and/or not need to worry about shuffling data around inbetween machines to speed it up
• Raw storage, as suggested by John