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How Many Google Machines, Really?
BoneThugND writes "I found this article on TNL.NET. It takes information from the S-1 Filing to reverse engineer how many machines Google has (hint: a lot more than 10,000).
'According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000. If you divide the $250 million figure from the S-1 filing by $278,000, you end up with a bit over 899 racks. Assuming that each rack holds 88 machines, you end up with 79,000 machines.'" An anonymous source claims
over 100,000.
There was an article recently about how Google constantly understates various statistics about itself to mislead potential competitors. This article also said that the SEC would not allow them to do this once they became a publically traded company.
According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000
Um, don't you think if you were buying 899 racks you might actually, you know, negotiate for a better price?
This isn't the only assumption in your analysis, and the problems with them will be compounded. What's the point of this, really?
I wonder if google will start up a web-hosting business? I bet you can't beat their uptime guarantees. They could provide sql, cgi, etc, and build in multi-machine redundancy for your data just like they do for theirs. It'll be the google server platform, just one more step to replacing Microsoft as the evil monopoly.
If you've ever read a white paper of Google's, you'd realize that they even tell people why they deal with massive clusters over mainframes: lower latency.
Sunny Dubey
...assuming 200W per server, which is probably low, but probably compensates for 79,000 being most likely an overestimate. However, that doesn't even begin to account for the energy used to keep the stuff cool.
Anyone know how many trees per second that would be? Conversion to clubbed-baby-seals-per-sec optional.
Please help metamoderate.
Interesting People 2004/05:
I know for a FACT they passed 100,000 last November. One thing the Louis calculation may have missed is Google's obsession with low cost. For example read the company's technical white paper on the Google file system. It was designed so that Google could purchase the cheapest disks possible, expecting them to have a high failure rate. What happens when you factor cost obsession into his equation?
I really doubt they are spending anywhere near this for the machines themselves. A former student a google employee made one of those recruiting/marketing visits to my university last semester. I got to speek to him at length about Google's operation. According to him (and he had pictures to back this up). All of their boxen are a motherboard, an ide drive and a processor sitting on a shelf in the rack. No cases, no fans, no cd, etc. Plus they buy in bulk and get good prices.
I was in Exodus - Toyama facility in Sunnyvale, CA back in 2001 and was talking to some of the data center techs, they were bitching because Google DOES stack 44 -half depth- servers in a rack, on EACH SIDE (aka 88 servers per rack indeed) and how the heat that produces is absolutely fucking insane and how he can't believe they don't meltdown. He was comlaining how frugal google was not giving the systems more room to breath.
--- www.f-theocean.com
Your hospital can't just lose a few CAT scans and think oh well, he'll be in for another scan eventually.
You've never worked in a medical field have you? You'd think that that would be a big deal and in theory data integrity is a very high priority but in reality...
I used to work as the IT Manager for a diagnostic imaging and cancer treatment center (and still do contract work with them because my replacement is kind of a noob) While loosing studies isn't exactly a "no big deal" situation it's still far more common than patients will ever realize. The server that stores and processes all of the digital images from the scanning equipment is a single CPU home rolled P4 using some shitty onboard IDE raid controller (doesn't even do RAID5!) running Windows 2K. The most money I could get for setting up a backup solution was the $200 an external firewire drive cost. Somehow we never managed to loose a study once it reached my network in the 9 months I worked there but I know three or four were deleted from the cameras themselves before being sent properly so whoops it's gone, gotta reschedule (and bill their insurance or Medicare again!) Two weeks ago one of the drives in that 0+1 array failed and despite my pleadings they still haven't ordered a replacement yet...
Now it's tempting to think that this place is just a special case of cheapness and sloppiness but from talking to the diagnostic techs (the people that operate the cameras) that's not so. That clinic is a little worse than average in terms of loosing patient information but by no means the worst some of them at seen/heard of/worked at in their careers. It's worse in general at small facilities but even large hospitals often suffer from the same unprofessionalism.
Your bank and the phone company keep much better track of your calls or your ATM transactions than most hospitals do with your CT or MRI scans...
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut