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Google's Early Hardware
revjonnylove writes "Ever wonder what Google's early hardware looked like? Well,
wonder no more.
Thanks to Archive.org's
Way Back Machine, we can all bask in the glory of Google's home made HDD cases, constructed partially of Lego, as well as other neat-o
toys. Is that a PowerPC logo I see on one of their servers?"
There are 9 9Gdrives between the two machines...The left box has 3 9G drives, and there are 6 4G drives on the right...This IBMdisk expansion box has another 8 9G drives...This is our homemade disk box which contains 10 9G SCSI drives
294 GB? That's a pretty damn nice mostly donated setup for 1997. This was '97 right?
Vonal Declosion
1GB per person. Servers made of Lego. No April Fools.
Its amazing to think that search engine used to run on just that.
Id be interested to see what their current hardware is like.
us pee ons that we can still create something very special with almost nothing but scrapped together hardware. Who said that we need millions to implement great ideas ?
With a hard drive case made of LEGOs and under a dozen computers google managed to become the world's most powerful search tool.
We all had to start somewhere right?
how come they got these free lunches from ibm etc. at the start itself. I wanna know!
Keep your eyes to the sky.
Last time I checked, those same model drives were listing for $5 on E-bay but not selling... it'd cost way more to ship them.
Are they in a museum or Google's vault? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's duplo you insensitive clod!
I think those types of setups are familiar to just about anyone that was in the computer arena in the early to mid-nineties. Having random machine without cases, 10 keyboards that may or may not be plugged in, and horrible wiring is probably how many of the top technological companies started. I am sure now it's all properly racked up with labeled cables and a KVM switch, but before the funding, I bet most companies run on old workstations. I thought the lego disk array was appropriate. I wonder what a fire marshal would have to say about their setup.
I think the worst setup I have seen was a previous company I worked for. They had a satellite office that just contained hardware. Well, no one ever went there, and for good reason. It housed quite a bit of old dialup gear, analog dialup gear, complete with external serial 28.8 modems. they were just stacked up all over the place. good thing they thought ahead and got modems with volume knobs, or you would be able to hear each person dialing in. The plastic racks all of the gear was sitting on was so old, it had started cracking and was a hazard to be around. It all worked somehow though. ahh...the good old days.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Oh. I thought you were going to talk about this.
I'm no psychologist but I'm pretty sure the simplicity of Google's site design could be an attempt to balance the chaos of their hardware and wiring setup
That is interesting, now that you pointed that out. Perhaps they got stuff for performance evaluation?
How does it look today?
how do they manage the wirering to all those servers today?
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
How about the /. ?
http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/
I love Google and want to have like a million of its babies. I want to print out Google's front page and rub it against my naked body. Actually, I've done it once already, got some nasty paper cuts. But it was worth it.
I LOVE GOOGLE
You can find tons of info and reading by googling 'site:stanford.edu backrub' should yeild some of the first papers and some great pictures.
Here.
It's amazing, how hardware changes.
But human-scale things remain the same. It still takes the same time to write a /. comment, or to sigh.
IBM may have sensed that google was going to make it big, so they sent them stuff, hoping to get a massive paid deal later on.
Or, it was just a dotcom thing to do - "Hey, I have an idea!" - "OK, I don't care what it is, but have this server!"
phil
Fowl hardware: pidgeons
"He who throws mud, loses ground." - proverb
For those who are wondering, I happen to own two of the very same machines in the top two pictures lol! They are Dell Poweredge 4200 machines with the logo plates removed! The specs are roughly this:
Dual CPU capable (max 333mhz)
Max RAM 512MB Bios Limit (66mhz EDO SDRAM)
6x80pin SCA drive bays
Dual 700 watt hot swap power supplies
Built in VGA (ATI Mach64 VT 1MB)
For the record, they typically ship with AMI Megaraid 428 (or higher) hardware raid cards. But the onboard SCSI2 is Adaptec AIC-7860 & 7880. Also worth mentioning, they are clusterable using Windows NT. I grabbed these machines off machine and local computer store and have been very stable work horses running Debian! (www.emaildesktop.com).
Just glad to see that these machines were useful in their days!
In case you're having a hard time loading the images from the story, you can find some other images here.
Hmmm pictures of old computers mildly interesting
Archive.org full text search very very interesting, having to know the URL in advance was a real limitation on the service!
Just to lighten up a little, check out a little story by Verity Stob on Life in the Google Farm.
My room is starting to look like that.
Ive got:
firewall (P133)
file/web/dns/mp3 server (pIII 700)
Qube 2 (MIPS 250Mhz, 256Mb RAM)
xbox (soon, going to be a webserver, moving to DSL line)
modem (urrrrgh)
16-port old switched 100mbit hub (donated)
dual-monitor desktop (not always on)
laptop (always with me)
No pictures though. You arn't a true geek unless youve at some point abandoned the idea of screwing everything into a case, screwing the case up and running it neatly.
My firewall spent 1 year in a drawer, the server's got hard drives attached to every ide channel (3 hd's and a writer) with hd's laying in the bottom of the case.
dunno, try searching on this site
i smell geek!!!!!
If you have broadband and a spare hour, have a look at this lecture about google by Urs Holzle. Its reasonably light on hard-core specifics, but he covers some interesting things like determining the relevance of a page, hosting problems due to very high power density, failure rates of hardware etc etc.
Interesting stuff.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of.. nah..
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
getting some info of google's current hardware in here seems a good idea. here goes.
here is a nice article. The company estimates that a server running Google applications all day is the equivalent of 40 years of use in a regular context. Approximately 82 of these servers die every day, but not completely; Google employs maintenance people who walk around with carts of hard disks, for example, and replace them in malfunctioning servers or UPSes.
now for some pics... damn. can't find them with googleShow a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
if only the Glastonbury ticket service was on such a powerful set up.
Dual Pentium IIs?
Luxury.
The fact that Google started as a research project at Stanford probably didn't hurt.
wonder how many lego blocks would they need to put together a cabinet to fit all those new hard disks they must be buying.
You call 7:22 AM a night? :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Gmail's servers also have powerpc logos on them..
(It's probably a april fools joke from macslash, though..)
It's too soon to joke about that farce :-(
I was in the pub last night and I swear people were unconsciously whistling that bloody 'engaged' tone. Beep...beep...beep...beep...<redial>.... (repeat for 24 hours or until crazy)
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Anyone else see this picture of Sergey in a speed-o? Here is another one of him IN DRAG. I kid you not!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Those white servers in the first pic are Dell PowerEdge 4100s if I'm not mistaken. Funny how the square Dell logo was removed and it says they were donated by Intel.
hrm... some of the same hardware that lives in my datacenter. but I don't get to take care of the beast. ahh.. IBM F50... =D
Those are not legos! I remember those things from way back when, they're Duplos. They're way bigger than Legos, and they don't cut your foot when you step on them. They're designed so that little kids can't hurt themselves. I never thought I'd see those again.
If someone drops a fort on Will, he makes a reflex save.
Let us never forget that it was all started by a case made of lego's
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
There's all sorts of donated crap lying around here at Stanford for people to use. Even today.
"The whole thing. Now which keyboard do I use?"
IBM Model "M".
http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm
But hey, he's a tenured prof now and just traded his wife in on a newer model 1/2 the age of the wife!
I knew teaching had some benefits. Regular yearly influx of fresh 'talent' makes up for the relatively poor pay.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This sounded interesting, but I hated the prof so I didn't take it. This class turned out to be related to the Google project of course and many of the people who took it ended up at the company.
My other brush with Google greatness was being designated driver for Larry (friend of a friend). This was before anyone knew about Google.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Here
Read on slashdot about what really happened to Craig Silverstein.
Unless those are the worlds smallest servers, I think those look like Duplo blocks, not Legos. I have boxes of both. Duplos are simpler, and about twice the size - although Duplos and Legos can be mixed. The thick Duplo baseplates make a much better case cover, as they would be stiffer than Legos. I especially like the operators' faces as a part of the case.
You know you're a computer nut when: 1) your bedroom has more computers in it than Google's early setup, and is much less organized. I have 15 in here now. 12x10' room. I pity the power wiring in here. One Pentium II is running in a case built entirely of STANDARD lego (not duplo). Deja vu all over again. Incedentally, I use DistCC, and can muster the CPU power equivalent to an 8GHz P4...
I have a BS in BS.
At my previous job, I was responsible for the web services for a financial services company. We hosted our stuff at a data center in Herndon, VA. Some of Google's hardware happened to be in a wire cage that I walked by every day and it was pretty damn impressive. 42U racks, with either 42 or 84 (back to back, 42U high) servers in each one and about 6-8 racks per cage. I will admit that my "technical ego" was bruised a little since I wanted it for myself... :-)
Yeah, um, I'm starting a search engine too. Send me lots of kick-ass hardware for free.
Peon is actually the word I think you were looking for... while the phrase "pee on" would probably accurately reflect the way that some workers are treated, it summons to mind some things that many of us would rather not think about.
It's a strange quirk of human nature that we form nostalgic attachments to old junk. Somehow the fond memories of an old car get converted into reluctance to part with a trembling rust bucket that leaves pools of oil in your driveway. Through some fault of thinking I have several old, useless 486 PCs taking up space in storage. What matters with google is not the hardware they got for free, or waxing nostalgic about data centers cluttered with 28K modems and piles of keyboards and monitors with 1-1 relationships to systems, but rather, the vision and hard work that hardware supported, and the thought, the beautiful algorithmic jazz, expressed in code and data on those old loud slow hunks of silicon and steel. Waxing nostalgic over pictures of old junk ought to be replaced by waxing creative over a close reading of the PageRank algorithm. That would be a more useful expenditure of your time on a saturday morning.
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half an hour later i come back and what do ya know - "Thank You for booking online with Aloud.com for your Glastonbury 2004 tickets..." Awesome baby! And a nice conformation email was waiting for me in Thunderbird. Yes i was crazy but happy, although last time I went it only cost a tenner for me to get in.
...when the answer was FLOOR MOUNTED servers the whole time! Next thing you know, we'll find out you can skip the expensive UPS and plug things straight into the wall...nah, that's crazy!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
For interested history buffs, the Duplo drive bay can be seen in a display case in the basement of Stanford's CS building.
Um... it was an april fool's joke...
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
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Well you can see where Goolge got the colour scheme for their logo. It is just the colours of the Lego bricks.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I bet that Sergey Brin regrets ever putting this photo online.
Open source is the art of letting other people write your bad code.
I was shocked to see that their lowest end search server is limited to a maximum of 20 GB. And it sounds like their highest end server maxes out at 200 GB. Either they haven't updated their web pages in ages or they only serve companies with tiny intranets or small libraries of content. Imagine if one GMail server could only handle 20 users (I know, nobody's to use all 1 gig)...that'd be enough servers to cause another california blackout.
The lego box is in the basement of the William
Gates Building on Stanford campus. It is inside
a little display made of wood and plastic.
I haven't looked carefully to see if the hard drives are actually still inside.
I pass this display almost daily on the way to class.
The irony of the building name has not been lost on me.
Nice Speedos
And people want to buy this guy's stock?
And you can get the whole shebang here: Sergey Brin's Stanford Homepage
The "lego machine" is in the basement corridor of the William Gates Computer Science Building (really!) at Stanford. The basement corridor seems to have the less-interesting historic hardware. There's also a large glass case of old networking hardware ("Wow! A DELNI!"), all unlabeled.
http://latin.realdictionary.com/Latin/lego.asp
lego - appoint, select.
lego - to gather, choose, collect, pass through,
read.
The word LEGO(R) is formed from the Danish word Leg Godt (play well). It was discovered later that the word in Latin means "I study, I put together".
Sorry, but I'm a LEGO NAZI...
LEGO has no need for an "s" on the end, even if there is 230 Ga-Billion blocks! (Ga-Billion is infinity +1 in case you were wondering)
Well I got 4 rubbermaid things full of spare parts!
Plus, NO TV, NO phone (yes DSL tho), 6 speakers, 2 turntables & MANY microphones!
Where it's at!
"Is that a PowerPC logo I see on one of their servers?"
God, even this "nerd" site is ruled by the Wintel Ignorances.
Wake up and go learn something other than what Wal-Mart/Microsoft shove up your ass/throat.
Gee whiz, it's so weird how it says "Happy Birthday April" at the bottom, linked to by "sign in"! What a cool feature!
but have you seen this one of Sergey Brin (co-founder)?
it was an april fool's joke
You are wrong.
Da Blog
... or did anyone else check out slashdot's archives just as soon as they got done looking at google? takes me back to the days of innocence - when I was playing football in high school and had no fucking clue as to what slashdot was, nor how much time i'd end up spending (wasting?) on it...
I think it's great to see how so many sites we regard as the high standard for information and entertainment now all got their starts - as small, underappreciated dreams of a few people that they kept alive through hard work, dilligence (and a healthy dose of luck along the way).
Sure Bill Gates' hair is fugly, but give his barber some credit! At least he managed to cover the horns on his forehead.
n/t
One on my own computers has a disk rack made of legos as well, but I used plexiglass scraps instead of foam rubber for the walls and there's some duct tape and velco in mine as well.
More pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from Stanford CS Department's Computer History Exhibits Photo Tour.
You can physically see this display in the basement of the Stanford Gates Building.
I bet that now their lego servers look like this ;-)
You are tough, you mine data,
You surf first and think later,
And your crawler fast as light
Wanders madly in the night.
Surf first, think later, huh? Not sure I can agree with that... ;-)
They sent us these boxes - beta Pentium IIIs - to write our software to SSE2. anyway, yeah - the chip packaging was still P II style.
Oh, and Intel's cases - THE WORST EVAR!
Does anyone know what kind of database software google uses ?
From their job postings it seems as if they might actually use mySQL, but I am not sure what for.
Where and how do they store their large indexed data ?
Also, 20GB of space is a lot in many applications, and search is one of them. These servers are designed to search through mostly text data (including HTML), and even large text files aren't usually more than a few hundred k, or a meg or two at most. If we assume that the average file to be searched is 500k, that's 40,000 searchable files on one low-end server. That's more than enough for a midsize company's support database, for example. These servers seem designed to search small to midsize intranets and midsize to large databases of specific information. If you need more than that for your specific application, you probably have enough resources to contact Google directly and work out a custom solution, as I'm sure many companies have done.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
From UWTV.org and the 2002 University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Colloquia:
Google Linux Cluster, The
Google's Linux cluster currently processes over 150 million queries a day, searching a multi-terabyte web index for every query with an average response time of less than a quarter of a second, with near-100% uptime. In this discussion, Google Fellow Urs Holzle will describe the software and hardware infrastructure that makes this performance possible, as well as provide an overview of the main problems facing a web search, software architecture, servers and compact rack hardware designs. For more information about this program, please see the CSE web site.
Watch here using Windows Media Player or compatible:
Modem
DSL (250k)
Cable (1300k)
The video is also available in streaming mpeg2 using IBM VideoCharger. If you are on the UW lan and want to use the VideoCharger link it can be found on the UWTV site.
"DRM is like violence: if it doesn't work, use more."
I really wanted to use some moderator points in this thread but NOBODY got it right!
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
What's with the giant floor tiles anyway?
I could never work in a place that sterile looking. I gots to have my extra short loop-pile carpet.
Then again, you could probably get a few raquetball games going in a place like that...
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
Then you'll have an 8GHz P4 even when you're not compiling! (useful unless you run Gentoo - distcc runs all the time then)
Where is all this hardware now? Some display case at Google HQ?
I think i read something of it being posted one day early to be the april fool's joke, and they had another one (opening up an office on the moon or something)
How long will that page last through an IPO?
Hm... let's e-mail them and ask.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
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