Computational power created computational science, which produced
a “fourth paradigm” — the overwhelming flow of data that now requires a computing change, said Jim Gray, a database software pioneer and a Microsoft researcher, a few weeks before he was lost at sea off the California coast in January 2007.

The goal, he insisted, was not to have the biggest, fastest single computer, but rather “to have a world in which all of the science literature is online, all of the science data is online, and they interoperate with each other.”

As a testimony to his passion and vision, colleagues at Microsoft Research have published a tribute to Dr. Gray’s perspective in “The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery.”