Here are some interesting dates in the history of the RAMCloud project:

• Fall 2008: John Ousterhout suggests the basic idea for RAMCloud to Mendel Rosenblum over lunch.

• Fall 2008, Winter 2009: Various informal discussions about the RAMCloud concept between John Ousterhout, Mendel Rosenblum, Guru Parulkar, Balaji Prabhakar, David Erickson, and others. John's initial goal is to support 1μs RPCs, but he backs off to 5-10$mu;s after Balaji explains the state of current datacenter switching fabrics.

• March 2009: during the systems dinner for prospective PhD students, John strikes up a conversation about RAMCloud with Ryan Stutsman (then a second-year student); Steve Rumble (first-year student) listens intently from across the room, then moves over to join the discussion. Diego Ongaro (a prospective PhD student) is in the room but doesn't participate in the conversation.

• Spring 2009: a discussion group meets weekly to explore design issues for RAMCloud. The results are published as the white paper The Case for RAMCloud, with all of the discussion group members as authors.

• Fall 2009: the RAMCloud implementation team is formed and the group begins to flesh out the design in detail. The initial students are Aravind Narayanan, Steve Rumble, and Ryan Stutsman; participating faculty are Christos Kozyrakis, David Mazieres, John Ousterhout, and Mendel Rosenblum. New PhD student Diego Ongaro starts attending group meetings in the fall, and officially joins the project at the beginning of 2010.

• Late Fall 2009: an oversimplified skeletal RAMCloud server responds to basic read and write and requests.

• Winter 2010: Diego creates a file system on top of the trivial RAMCloud server and also shows that transactions can be implemented at application level. More work on the design (preparation for April design review), but not much progress on the main system implementation: Ryan and Steve are mostly occupied finishing up their old project (Cinder) and studying for quals.

• April 1, 2010: all-day RAMCloud design review, which includes external reviewers from Berkeley (Michael Armbrust, Mike Franklin, and Tim Kraska) Facebook (Keith Adams and Bob English), Google (Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz Barroso), Hewlett-Packard (Jeff Mogul and Partha Ranganathan), Microsoft (Marcos Aguilera and Jim Larus), NEC (Yoshiki Seo and Masamichi Takagi), NetApp (Tim Emami and Shankar Pasupathy), and SAP (Shel Finkelstein).

• Spring 2010: initial work on the RPC transport system (e.g. first implementation of Buffer class). Aravind graduates.

• Summer 2010: the basic RPC system comes to life with several different transports, including first implementation FastTransport.

• Fall 2010: focus shifts to fast recovery: can we implement and evaluate this in time for SOSP paper submission deadline of March 18, 2011?

• November 8: first successful recovery (TcpTransport, 2 backups, 2 masters, 1 segment, 1 partition)

• December 2010: 40-node cluster ordered.

• January 2011: Nandu Jayakumar joins project.

• February 23, 2011: 40-node cluster arrives (only 3.5 weeks before SOSP deadline).

• February 24, 2011: recovery works on cluster (but many performance issues still to resolve).

• March, 2011: Nandu's measurements show that RAMCloud is achieving 5μs RPCs for 100-byte reads; a single server can handle more than 1M RPCs/second. These measurements were taken with the 40-node cluster using Mellanox Infiniband networking.