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Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System

Posted by timothy on from the other-other-other dept.

Frisky070802 writes "Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has an article by Simson Garfinkel that compares the huge distributed systems run by Google and Akamai and speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai. It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO."

3 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. obvious to everybody in the room... by dcfix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...he repeated that figure of 1,000 queries per second--but he said that the measure was made at 2:00 a.m. on December 25, 2001. His point, obvious to everybody in the room, is that even by November 2002, Google was doing a lot more than 1,000 queries per second--just how many more, though, was anybody's guess.

    What's obvious to me is that the metrics were taken at 2am on Christmas morning... not that they were taken a year earlier.

    --
    What cod piece?
  2. If those numbers are correct.... by stienman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Assuming those numbers are correct, and assuming they use several year old algorithms:

    Google can break an RSA-512 key. 12 times a day.

    It would take them 8 months to break an RSA-1024 key.

    Of course this glosses over some of the technical difficulties (such as memory bandwidth, RAM, etc) but the interesting thing is that if they directed their gaze towards a problem of for even an hour, they could solve some truly monumental problems.

    But, according to Slashdot, Google is good today, not evil, so we can expect them not to use their power for bad.

    -Adam

  3. Use Freecache by tepples · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thanks to archive.org, you too can join in on the caching fun! If you want to post a web page's URL to Slashdot without having it, um, Slashdotted, you could use Freecache. If you run a major ISP or university IT department, Freecache could use you.