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Hi, this is Chris Dixon's the A16Z podcast.

I'm here with Herman Nerula from Improbable and VJ Panday from Stanford, who's also

a professor in residence here at A16Z.

Hey, guys, let's talk about distributed computing.

So my own view, I guess, I'll just start it off, is that over the next few decades,

distributed computing will be a particularly

important topic because we're now with things like AWS awash in computing resources.

You know, compute is becoming approaching zero, storage, networking.

But most of this is, you know, on multiple physical machines. And it's very, very hard for software developers to build software that distributes well.

And so we have things like, I think, of Hadoop and its successor, we think as successor, Spark, as frameworks for doing distributed computing for specific application,

which is data processing.

And I think we'll probably see more of that kind of pattern among other verticals.

And also, at the same time, more infrastructure that helps us, you know, programming languages,

frameworks, et cetera, that help us do this.

So, I don't know, maybe Vij, if we could start off.

How do you view this?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is the key issue, right?

Because everyone can program the standard C paradigm on one processor core.

Now actually, you know, going to multi-core is not so hard, but start thinking about multiple boxes,

thousand boxes, 10,000 boxes.

...