Applications

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

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