EET: What should be done?
Patterson: I certainly hope the U.S. government will begin funding security and privacy as seriously in the future as it used to fund projects for making computers faster and cheaper. Our society and economy hugely benefited from those investments in lots of major industries and jobs. I would say society certainly needs these new improvements in these areas.
If we don't come up with some great ideas, [security and privacy could become] a downside of distributed computing. We have seen episodes where psychological anxiety about technology has slowed its growth for instance the European reaction against genetic engineering of food. People are even talking about whether the fear of self-replicating devices could affect the development of nanotechnology. And some people are concerned about privacy issues with distributed sensor networks.
EET: You helped set a direction in distributed computing with your work here on the Network of Workstations Project, linking low-cost systems together into one big system. What did you learn from that?
Patterson: We came into it as a low-cost supercomputer based on off-the-shelf components. The project set a database sort record, but to get that record we had to run it at 3 a.m. What was interesting was why we couldn't we get that in the middle of the day.
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