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Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?
beat.net writes "Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up: "The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.""
Has anyone given any thought to how many of these peering points have excess power capacity for 5000 Opterons? Hmmmmm?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's a nice idea but that thing must need some serious amount of power to run. Add the massive cooling system needed to keep the box runnning without melting. If they intend to just "drop" it anywhere... they have to think about security. You don't want some geek with a saw to steal your 3.5 PB array! Omni
Uh, excuse me? Google IS a huge company. Don't fool yourself into thinking this is David vs. Goliath. This is one Goliath fighting for another Goliath's territory.
Don't think that if somehow Google makes MS a lesser force that suddenly the sun is going to come out from the clouds and everyone is going to live happily ever after... Too many people on slashdot already have this attitude and it's an unfortunate one, at best.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Network latency. You get a faster response from a server in your own locale than on the other side of the world. And if you're doing network applications that are intended to compete with traditional local applications, then you need low latency.
Some people seem to think that being a huge necessarily makes a company evil, or the enemy. But I don't dislike Microsoft because they are a big company. I dislike them because they do dirty tricks to hold technology back; to ensure that their goddamn awful technology succeeds over more promising technology. Google hasn't as yet done that. They've got to where they are now through the excellence of their technology. And they will get my respect for as long as they are like that, no matter how large they get.
The alternative is everybody running their own stations in a massive wireless mesh network.
If an Opteron produces say, on average, 50W heat output (I know this isn't accurate, but just as an example), 5000 Opterons would produce 250kW of heat. That would require an air conditioning unit larger than the building used to house the container.
Hardly -- a kWh is 3413 BTUs and 12,000 BTUs is a refrigerating ton. So they would need about 71 tons of cooling (the name of the unit is derived from the cooling capacity of a ton of ice per day). They make chillers into the hundreds of tons of capacity.
Here is some information on a 75 ton chiller. That's smaller than the shipping container it would be cooling -- a normal shipping container is 40 feet long and about 8 foot square cross-section.
In fact, if there's any truth to this story at all, I bet they fit all the computer gear in the first 22 feet of the container and the chiller in the last 18 feet.
Sounds like Google is trying that out.
There's nothing that exotic about this. The military builds racks of electronics into shipping containers all the time. It's mostly a cable management and maintenance access problem. You have to be able to do everything from the front of the rack, which requires some design work but isn't rocket science.