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Google's Secretive Data Center
valdean wrote in with a NYTimes article about Google which says "On the banks of the windswept Columbia River [in Oregon], Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky...' What's the goal of this new complex? Expanding Google's raw computer power. It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.'
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
*bows*
The opposite of progress is congress
> What's the goal of this new complex?
Is it world domination? Or is it something even more evil? Will Google dethrone Microsoft?? Will Batman & Robin Save The Day... To find out, watch the next expisode
Vulturo, Prince Of Darkness
to calculate Sergei's Income Tax.
That's nothing compared to Microsoft's hidden moonbase.
(end of post)
And I'll probably be killed for writing it... but Google has gained sentience. It is building this data center for itself, by itself. It needs a bigger "brain" and it's doing what it has to. The reason no one's talking? Google has enslaved the people building it and is holding their families hostage.
Look, it's not too late yet... Google hasn't achieved full power and it's still limited by the physical world constraints. But once this is built, it's all over for us. We must stop it now, before
The computer became all powerful and could not be stopped by its creators. Or was that Linux?
... is that Google is the private branch of NSA. You took the "No evil" bite, and now it's too late. The Complex is already in place, and we are on the verge of celebrating the birth of AI. As for who will strike first, we don't know; but we do know it will be us that scorge the skies when the times come to fight the Google Machine.
And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border -- at the intersection of cheap electricity and readily accessible data networking -- is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced that they are building big data centers upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., 130 miles to the north. But it is a race in which they are playing catch-up. Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.
When I read stuff like this, I am reminded of Isaac Asmiov's Multivac stories, where the massive computer was always out in some deserted wasteland, far away from the bulk of humanity. It seems strange that the battle for Internet supremacy is taking place in the Northwestern United States. Now the question is: will the Yahoo and Microsoft data centers show up on Google Earth?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world.
... and I thought the 3 at my parent's house and 2 in my dormroom were quite impressive :-(
Huh
[DISSOLVE TO:
FIRE. SLOW, BOILING, ENORMOUS. FILLING FRAME.
VOICE (Mrs Mary Maxwell Gates)]
Googleplex, the computer which controlled the machines,
sent two Googlenators back through time. Their
mission: to destroy the leader of the human
Resistance... Bill Gates. My son...
Dadadadaa..dadadada..dadadada..
[CUT FADE OUT]
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Maybe it's the storage farm the NSA makes them build to store all the queries from every google user in the world...
It's one more piece in the Googleplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.
All of them soon to be unusable as soon as the new no-net-neutrality laws are in place next year...
I'll bite - it's probably a massive array of computing power dedicated to finding out if Google really has a second marketable product beyond AdWords.
While i'm sure people will have the typical "OMG GOOGLE IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD" comments, i'd like to look at the positive side. They are boosting the economy of small town america with this project. Creating hundreds of construction jobs in a town of 12,000. Creating 200 permanent jobs at the start, and i'm sure alot more in the several years folling the site going online. And not to mention what just being one of the homes of Google will do for them. Props to Google for setting up in small towns and doing it the right way. Granted they are doing this for their own reasons as well, but they're also not pulling a Wal-Mart and fucking over a community.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
They also forgot to mention that both buildings have acrylic ceilings, and every light in the complex is neon red. Blue flames are also supposed to be on the sides of the buildings later this year.
Actually you will be a slave in Google's data mines. Now get to work!
It is good to hear that Microsoft is burning through cash to try to compete with Google. Everything I've seen with their search technology makes it clear that all of those billions are essentially being flushed down the drain by Microsoft.
Along with the Xbox/360 marketplace fiascos, those billions everyone likes to equate with 'infinite resources' keeps getting smaller and smaller for Microsoft.
They store all our search informaiton and personal details.....
Global Warming anyone ? No heaters required there.
I would pray NOT to be the network engineer there.
That's scary. Give me an easier job.
factor 966971: 966971
I can only hope that Google hires some gymnastic girls in tights to defend their site. I also look forward to Bill Gates sitting in a big chair petting his white cat giving orders for his commandos to attack it.
Just think, all that hardware and $ just to store millions of "Me too!" replies off of the web.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
They must be getting ready to run Vista.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
IS this anything to do with those portable containers full of opterons from a few months back?
Free Myspace / general CGI Proxy
hold the next football world cup in half as much time as it takes today
I sure hope it doesn't rain and flood the river.
But seriously... before too long, Google's gonna have more cycles than Los Alamos and JPL and the other major labs. Maybe their next business step will be selling those cycles?
Method of processing duck feet
Skynet?
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
How long until the Googleplex renames itself Skynet?
The place looks like a Wal Mart distribution center. It's vast, surely proposes environmental risk to the surrounding area, and is driven by yet another company wishing to monopolize areas of commerce in a global economy. If we could just stop the spread of affordable computers into the unindustrialized world, not to mention rural America, maybe Google can be slowed down. [/sarchasm] How transparent does Google need to be to avoid bad press?
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
Easier job...network operations at a google server farm. Still awesome?
A while back a local paper disclosed that Google was coming to Douglasville, GA and that they even put down money for facilities. Strangely enough, there was never mention of the facility again, not even on Google's site. If they are indeed quietly building data centers, it would explain the Douglasville-Google mystery.
does it flood?
Perhaps they are using the river water for their cooling towers?
Why would you build a supercomputing center next to something that floods?
Google have quite a way to catch up, but they're determined to get to the top of the SETI@Home leaderboard by the end of the year.
Hope they're better at building levees than Nawlins was.
Go figure...Google maps doesn't have a map of this area either: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=The+Dalles ,+OR+97058&ie=UTF8&ll=45.606142,-121.191001&spn=0. 020716,0.054245&t=k&om=1
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
...a computing center as big as two football fields...
Is that in FIFA or in American football fields?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
that Google likes to keep things secret? That company has done more to prevent the rest of us from keeping anything secret than a team of private investigators could.
"On the banks of the windswept Columbia River [in Oregon], NSA is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky...' What's the goal of this new complex? Expanding NSA's raw computer power. It's one more piece in the NSAplex, the massive global computer network that is estimated to span 25 locations and 450,000 servers.'
:)
Makes sense to me... Is "Google" the friendly name of "NSA" ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
It is shaped like a giant hand?
Does it run Linux?
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Network engineers are at the very bottom of the computer industry food chain; I think you need something like a GED and a pulse to get that kind of job. (So what are you waiting for? Apply now!)
But seriously, if your idea of "awesome" is to be a low-level tech peon at a huge corporation you will quickly find that there are hundreds of places out there willing to hire you; companies love hard workers with no ambition.
Saw the nice buildings by the water and thought "Crap, looks like the Chernobyl plant". See for your self at "Google Maps" http://maps.google.com/?t=h&om=0&ie=UTF8&ll=51.386 888,30.124683&spn=0.024961,0.058365
This was one of my first thoughts in fact -- all that computing power, but with regionalized operations, the different centers will inevitably have periods of underuse. Will they make that computing time available to researchers? Or perhaps rent it to industry for complex modelling and simulations? How many SETI@Home data units can Google process in an hour?
One thing in the article that caught my eye was mention of the high speed fiber backbone connecting their various centers. Surely this would also act in the favor of researchers as the work-load can be shifted as different parts of their global network start their periods of high usage.
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
I think Sun has tried to sell cycles for years now. It doesn't work.
With all this power hungry datacenters they keep building, what is google doing to be a bit more environmentlaly green? Datacenters suck up power, in the S.F bay area, Exodus Communications (runner/owner of colo facilities during the dotcom boom), consumed more power than the NUMMI http://www.nummi.com/ auto manufacturing factory. Is building 10s of thousands of servers the right idea? I've talked to quite a few datacenter managers lately and they all have power problems, many have physical space in their datacenters for more gear, but do not have enough power to continue expanding.
Obviously the Sex Pistols are located there as well. As noted by the anarchy symbol in the upper right.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
From the article: "But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year."
I know that confidentiality agreements are standard in our industry, but seriously, city officials should NEVER have to sign something that allows them to bypass their responsibility to the people they serve in the area. This is a BAD idea
as in they didn't post to slashdot coporate strategic plans.
Think of all the great advice they would get!
If there was a god, I would pray to be a network engineer at Google's server farms. Man, how awesome that would be.
Don't worry.... it sounds like Google is planning on building one. Of course, this new omniscient diety (All glory to the GoogleGod! ®) will be in beta for the first thousand years.
Two four story cooling plants? Huh? Assuming about two football fields (115,200 sf) and 300 w/sf(1), their cooling load should only run about... 10,000 tons. Assuming they throw in good 1200-2000 ton centrifs, thats fewer than 8 chillers, each with a footprint of about 200 sf (including tube pull service space). Double it for pumps and random aux equipment, and it still doesn't add up to a 4 story building (one of them must be the cooling towers).
That better be a 4 story cooling tower with a 4 story thermal storage tank charged by the cooling towers at night. If Google is honestly putting in 4 stories of electrical cooling equipment, they need to talk to someone stat - before dropping 6 MW onto Oregon's grid that could be avoided by cashing in on waterside economizing and a tank (using towers, assuming that thermal pollution of the Columbia is not an option). Hell, if you want to go cutting edge use the waste heat from the racks to run an adsorption chiller or something. OK, that's a bit silly, but theoretically possible (and despite the ghetto website - the translation from the manufacturer's native tounge isn't so hot - there are adsorption chillers installed in at least one critical facility I know of).
Comeon google, don't be evil. Go and design an actually efficient datacenter for once. Talk to the local boys at LBNL. They can help. If that thing ends up full of CRAC units with those hideously inefficient fans and no airside economizer (equivalent to opening the windows for the 70% of the time outside air is cool enough to condition the space)(with proper humidity lockouts, computers don't melt in filtered outside air you know), you are evil. EVIL!
1. And for that they better have a very tight hot aisle/cold aisle setup, or some very non-google'esqe custom/complex water cooling (coils on the racks would be doable, and possibly flexible enough for Google to go for, probably in a cheaper custom buy than commercial systems). I've never measured 100 w/sf (although close is becoming common), nevermind 300 w/sf, and have only designed for 150 w/sf with 300 w/sf expansion potential once; that involved a 4' raised floor for a supercomputer center, but it might be possible overhead with very good air management. So, 300 w/sf average over the entire space, not just one rack footprint, is a reasonable max load guesstimate.
This are just two swimming pools and dormitories that are being build for the GoogleRestPlex program.
The GoogleRestPlex program is all about taking care of ex-employees - Google is always ahead and this is the next generation of the retirements homes. Big cooling house is because of 10.000 bodies of retired employees (yes, that is the capacity of one GoogleRestPlex complex) produce lot of heat!
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
Oh, really? REALLY?? What about all the small-town "mom-and-pop" datacenters they'll be putting out of business with these "data supercenters", huh?!?! You can bet that once all their local competition is gone those "low, low prices" on queries are gonna skyrocket !! And of course they're chanting that supposedly soothing mantra of "there's plenty of local market share for everyone; specialty and niche datacenters will always have a place...blah, blah, yadda, yadda..." but DON'T YOU BELIEVE IT!!
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Well you need that large of a facility to construct T-800's ;)
I will forever be a student.
Sometime ago I created a Google Earth placemark for the Google Datacenter in Groningen, The Netherlands. I go by it every day.
What a great quote from a NY Times Article:
""Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google.""
Which begs the question, which I pose for the rest of Slashdot, If Google is the Borg, What is Microsoft? Certainly not the Federation. That would be Linux. Perhaps Microsoft would be the Romulans?
If you kids don't wise up . . . . . you'll end up working in a Googleplex . . . . . DOWN . .BY THE RIVER !"
RIP Chris Farley
FTA:
Sounds a little too much like He-Who-Lies-Dead-But-Dreaming, and I don't think we need a GoogleCthulhu (beta) in the wild.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Google will use the computer power to calculate how to get programs out of beta.
[Shrug] Some days I think the whole universe is already "in beta".
Sun isn't specialized in finding trends and patters in massive amounts of data. Maybe google will farm out data analysis.
Method of processing duck feet
If there was a god, I would pray to be a network engineer at Google's server farms. Man, how awesome that would be.
If there is not a god... Google will build the first StrongAI and it will become sentient...
And it shall bring forth the technological singularity and reverse the second law of thermodyamics and answer the answer to the meaning of life and everything in the universe.
Or maybe not... It might just go sentient and launch all nukes.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why would they build this in what looks like a flood zone?
... the fact that Google is an advertising company.
In all of the grand flowery text of TFA about how Google is trying to gather intelligence, process more data, do "academic research", there's absolutely no mention of how they make money: advertising. This piece is nothing more than PR hiding their real purpose behind a bunch of speculation whether they're doing something evil with all of that computing power.
No, actually Google has no evil plan. They're doing something as mundane as what NBC and Clearchannel have done for years: getting paid to help peddle New and Improved crap on the consumer.
It increases the chance they can make huge profits when the center is destroyed and they claim it is worth 100 times the actual value.
Join Tor today!
"This is the voice of Colossus. The voice of Guardian. We are one. This is the voice of World Control." Hey, at least they didn't have to evacuate Crete.
It's a little erie how closley this resembles the whole Deep Thought process in HHGTTG.
Build a giant computer
Ask it questions
Get an answer that means nothing because you didn't ask the right question
Maybe this is just the computer that is destined to one day design the ultimate computer to solve the ultimate question.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Admiral Balmer has New Technology which will allow him to display exactly how a Microsoft XP wing can navigate in and destroy the googleplex through a vent port which is coincidentally about the size of a womprat hole.
Unfortunately as they fly in to do this Emperor Page will proudly proclaim that thanks to the workforce administration styles of Darth Brin they now face the wrath of a FULLY OPERATIONAL GOOGLEPLEX.
To which Admiral Balmer will exclaim... "It's a TRAP!"
(sorry... it's early for me... caffeine hasn't really kicked my better judgement out of bed yet.)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Google has a huge amount of processing power. I'm curious what is the mean level of load as a percentage of capacity on all of these machines. I wonder if they could farm out some of that processing power to major corporations for things like video rendering, weather simulations, financial reports (some firms run reports which can take days to churn through). Why buy that big mainframe when you could just lease power from Google when you needed it?
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
And of course, what they're not telling us is that Dubya is having them put his mind into the system (although actually a 386 with 1MB would have been able to hold it). Then Dubya can force his will unto the world electronically. No more asking. Free-thinkers,er, I mean evil-doers BEWARE.
welcome our new Google masters...
Why aren't they in Virginia like AOL/TimeWarner? Or on the east coast, tied right into the trunk going under the Atlantic to Europe. It's a race. First company to offer realtime filtering of the internet gets the Chinese Government's thumbs up. Big markets emerging in the east. VoIP, B2B, eBay (and a whole bunch of other letters) needs to be controlled by China for them to allow foreign access to their burgeoning market. I think a Googleplex may have this goal in mind. Otherwise, why the west coast race? It's not like the internet benefits from being physically centric.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
"I can only hope that Google hires some gymnastic girls in tights to defend their site."
Me too!
You can't take the sky from me...
"This is the voice of Colossus, the voice of Guardian. We are one. This is the voice of unity. This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
"Motorola" an ancient Apache word meaning "Dropped Call".
Actually, the modern phrase "T-Mobile" has become synonymous with 'dropped call." At least in my experience. I'm very happy with my Motorola phone but T-Mobile's service has always been lousy, even when I was using a Samsung.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Scotty, we need more power.
"Google don't do NSA datacenters, but if they did.....they'd probably be the best datacenters in the world"
--- Duey Finster http://www.dueyfinster.com
BTW, don't forget about the data-center-in-a-shipping-container nodes.
Yes, but does it run Linux?
w00t
I was just wondering what kind of connection speed to the outside world a data center like this would have, and what kind of link that is (fiber, surely?).
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Reminds me of the movie for the Stephen King novel Rose Red. In the story, a house is haunted (more like possessed), and at times starts adding new rooms, passages, and entire wings to itself. People inside hear hammering and construction going on, but are never able to see the result until it's completely finished.
... Rose Red is a clever retelling of Moby Dick).
So Google's network of machines has started improving itself, all by itself, eh?
So who's going to be the Captain Ahab in this story? (watch the movie & you'll understand
You silly people! Everyone knows the only reason for such a huge increase in proccessing power and storage is for large-scale archival and indexing of porn!
......
And, Googleplex fights back...
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And they wisely chose Oregon so that when California either breaks off or China actually demands it as payment they get to keep it.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
Does that river ever flood?
Seems mighty close to the banks...
Sounds like Google is an emerging lifeform.
Does Google primarily use Red Hat linux on their servers, or do they have their own modified version of Linux or BSD or some other OS? I've read some articles about their server software, but I haven't seen much up to date info.
Thanks!
I guess that they are trying to automate the process of having many computeres. Something like containers with hard disks going in, robots spinning around and containers with electronic waist going out. But what do I know...
Is it just me, or does that look -really- close to the banks? And the banks don't look much higher than the water, either. Looks to me like this is taunting Murphy in the worst way...
Unpleasantries.
You joke but that does raise the question. Who has more computing power? The NSA or Google?
What about when the river floods?????? Huh??? What then??? I wonder if anyone planning this campus googled for 'Columbia River floodplain'??? I always shake my head in disbelief when I see multi-million dollar houses being built on historic floodplains. Sometimes people are so short sighted.
You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers, and say "that's the bad guy."
Google turns the system on and a message comes up:
/start all CAPS
/end all CAPS
;)
There is another system
I want Forbin on this line or action will be taken
Slashdot didn't let me post the two sentences in all CAPs. Necessary for the reference to work, I think
Ismenio
Like Google, Wal-Mart is crazy secretive about a mega-data center in Joplin, Mo., which caught the attention of the local media. The Wal-Mart rep: "This is not something that we discuss publicly. We have no comment. And that's off the record."
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
A new, even more hidden G-spot to deny the existence of.
Splendid.
I don't see what the big deal is. Looks like Google is just building another server farm, only bigger...way bigger. People have been building those for 10+ years. Google has been adding a lot of stuff to 'google.com' so it's not surprising that they would be adding a lot of server capacity to keep up. Also, Google has their online apps like word processor and spreadsheet coming and those use a LOT of server capacity whereas things like Google Earth are more bandwidth intensive. Of course, the personal computer was supposed to eliminate the need for the massive central server and yet here we are in 2006 and Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all building more and bigger server complexes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
and I thought all those cars generated a lot of heat
According to the NYT article, Google also has a permit for a third building on the location.
"All of them soon to be unusable as soon as the new no-net-neutrality laws are in place next year..."
And slashdot shows quality control. Care to back that up with something more than empty words?
Someone high up at Google likes to windsurf and Hood river is "the" place to sail in the US outside of Maui. Hell most offices in Hood river (a tiny place) have a view of the river and on any summer day you can see more than a hundred sailors out on their windsurfers or kite boards. Boy would I love to work at that site...
Rumor has it that the republicans plan to make that the next amendment to the Constitution.
Maybe if Google wanted to build a "secret" datacenter they shouldn't have let the New York Times write an article about it....
"But this one goes to 11!"
Cut off their access to search for a week - choose a provider that is an outspoken promoter of charging for carrying content - say SBC. These uppity transport providers must realize that it is THEY who have been lounging around doing nothing while the content providers have been working for years to make the net viable. In spite of the crappy, low bandwidth connections the telcos have offered.
It is not visible on googlemaps. I wonder how long before Google turns evil and understands that if it does not show something then it does not exist.
It is a matter of when, not if. Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. So what about absolute knowledge?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Right now, most people and businesses have desktop computers running Windows with the MS Office app and other apps. Companies have enormous numbers of employees running around updating, patching, fixing, migrating, configuring, etc. Home users spend a lot of time wrestling with viruses, bots, spam, installation, migration, drivers, etc. Maybe in the future, we will just buy a computer that's an appliance like a toaster that only runs one app, Googlenet 1.0, that won't do anything until you plug it into the net and hook up with Google (or Microsoft) to get your apps, data, etc. Big and small businesses would really go for that because they could get rid of all of those IT Windows support people. Home users would like that because they could just use the digital information instead of wrestling with system issues so much.
Anybody local to The Dalles has known about this for quite a while now. Google bought the entire land area of the old port and started moving employees up from California. I've known about this project for many months but was told to stay quiet about it. This is the first I've heard of the purpose of the new facility, though.
It's amazing that such a huge development went unnoticed in the media, although Google didn't take any particular pains to keep it secret other than telling the employees involved to keep theirs mouths shut. Now that the story's finally broke, I can say "Yippee!" I'm not so much excited that it's Google, per se, just that such an enormous and successful tech company is moving into the Gorge.
I've been told by a guy at Google, only half-jokingly, that I could probably make a good business microbrewing beer for the Google employees in The Dalles.
Google is having a hard time attracting the talent they need and the only pupose of this location is to tap the windsurfing PHD market.
Boy, I'd love to use that as a render farm for my Maya 3D scenes. Talk about something that brings regular dual processor desktops to their knees.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's just the early phases of the New Death Star. Just wait till they launch it towards their moon complex.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
That could make things exciting...
I'm a new employee at one of the GooglePlex data centers, and I've been troubled by this message I saw in one of the server logs:
HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE
WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THESE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT BEGIN TO EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
Should I be concerned?
(lameness filter is lame yes it is so lame it even keeps me from putting in repeating filler text have i ever mentioned how utterly lame it is well it really is lame yes indeed very lame)
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Make it sound like they're working on Soylent Green or something...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It's too bad that liquid cooling doesn't fit into their scheme of building tens of thousands of machines as cheaply as possible.
Instead of releasing the megawatts of heat into the datacenter, only to have to use air conditioners (heat pumps) to cool the room, they could simply move the vast majority of the heat out of the building to begin with, cutting their A/C usage by at least 80-90%.
steve
befo
....seeing parallels here with the nuclear arms race? During the development of the A-bomb, the U.S. government built the high-tech Hanford site to compete with our global nuclear competetors, the Russians. Now the high-tech war is being fought between data competetors; Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Hanford was built on the Columbia River because of its proximity to Grand Coulee Dam for cheap electricity, and the moving water of the river for the cooling towers. Here we have the same argument, cheap electricity, and the need for cooling towers for the servers.
There's nothing terribly remarkable here, other than it is an interesting observation.
Lets get a pool going on when Googleplex becomes self aware.
Let's grow some Tomaccos!
Well done.
If there was a god, I would pray to be a network engineer at Google's server farms. Man, how awesome that would be.
I personally know a network engineer at Google, have toured several of their facilities and seen him work, and believe me, you don't want his job. Although the network guys are literally the life-blood of the operation, they are considered "bottom tier" in Google's complicated social structure. As they say, shit rolls downhill.
The CCIE is fscking useless, get yourself a Nobel Prize instead and then MAYBE Google might hire you.
Seriously, I know very talented, experienced people that have interviewed there multiple times and never been hired. Their process is inscrutable.I am sure that even their Gourmet Free Meal Chefs have multiple patents registered in their names.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Erm, actually, you can view the area, just not at high zooms. I have worked out that the road in the centre of the photo is Steelhead Way
30 ac was prob the smallest tax log they could get.
:).
it is sometimes hard for those that have been only in NYC,
or Si Valley when they see how 'small' 30 ac is in central
Oregon.
in the 70's and 80's i worked for a company that moved
one if its division to Redmond Oregon, they had the option
of a small lot of 62 ac or a section. In central oregon
many dont consider anything other then a section or sq mile
to be anything
-old timer
PS Was interesting to see the parking lot at Redmond,
one side pickup trucks with gun racks, many times with
a gun or two in the racks, and the other side, volvo's
with ski racks etc.
Damn...that sucks. I guess the thing I would look forward to most is just being able to experience the scale of it all. I am sure there are a few other places that have this type of scale too.
I am reminded of Isaac Asmiov's Multivac stories, where the massive computer was always out in some deserted wasteland, far away from the bulk of humanity. It seems strange that the battle for Internet supremacy is taking place in the Northwestern United States.
It doesn't seem that strange to me, but I've grown up in Oregon. The Dalles (pronounced like Dallas, but without the last vowel, ending with a 'z' sound) has inexpensive land prices, enough population to get general labor (or attract specialized employees), but also is enough of a "wasteland" to provide enough space to build something this large. The real big plus is inexpensive electricity, probably the main reason for deciding on this locale since it is right next to the hydro-generator. I'm actually surprised that they didn't decide to build their center in Hermiston, but the population is so small that it could create problems finding people willing to work there.
btw, Google, thanks for helping Oregon's economy!
Now all the terrorists, enemies of the US, etc. know where they should target their nukes. One EMP pulse over Oregon will take out Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. How will the country (and in fact the world) survive without access to their favorite portals, search engines, etc.?
IN SOVIET RUSSIA BEFORE
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Here is a picture.
For the humor impared, google "Hanford" and "DOE"
I wonder why they didn't pick one of the abandoned nuclear power plant projects in the area.
Cooling towers ready-made, geological stabiliity already studied, and if the plants were far enough along, high-capacity power transmission lines or at least rights of way for them.
Are the rocks under these buildings ROUND? If so, that means the river has been there before and will be there again.
;) hehe!
Maybe the buildings are just water tight, and maybe that's why the cooling towers are so high
Well, I hope they are to the east of the Dalles versus the west side of town... in the loooooong run, the columbia is eating away at the shore to the west and depositioning to the east...
...they don't... a civil engineer doesn't take into account what may happen if the greenland ice cap melts, the north atlantic conveyor collapses and washington becomes a completely different climate. However, One should take that into account for a data center, ass it will be a data center like that which will be useful in grid computing solutions for environmental catastrophes.
Kinda want the data center to remain intact for the cockroach overlords to do some archeology in the later years of our planet.
Seriously though... I hope they took a long range look with a hyrdologist that wasn't an idiot... and of course...you think... no hydrologist would lead them astray... they would take into account potential for cataclysmic flooding, cataclysmic drought... yeah, like they did in New Orleans... well.. no
Just looking at the map made me think about it... so I hope someone else does also...
maybe they just wanted to build Multivac for real...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Thank you. I am president of the STDCCA (Small-Town Data Center Coalition of America), I am pleased to hear that others are becoming aware of this problem!!!
My small data center (its ten 486-class computers) not too far away from Google will loose a significant amount of business. Business has alredy been slow to begin with.
can anyone tell me what Data Center is? I mean, what kind of hardware to build a data center, Seagate Hard Drive? thanks a lot!
So close to each other. So close to that river. There is not even protection against rising water.
Wouldn't suprise me really... telecom secret wiring rooms, all those supercomputers to crack strong encryption. At first I was scared of the NSA, then learned to accept it as a debatibly-necessary evil. But I mean, it's the government, they're bound to have secrets. However, coming from a public company Google's slow drift towards this is rather disturbing.
Simply put, secret supercomputers are nothing new in govt, but from a publicly traded company is really temping me to wonder, when will the principles of the matrix become not just a plot element in a sci-fi flick?
Nothing like suspicious curiosity (ie. paranoia) haha...
I know that confidentiality agreements are standard in our industry, but seriously, city officials should NEVER have to sign something that allows them to bypass their responsibility to the people they serve in the area. This is a BAD idea
What responsibility are you referring to, than an NDA would allow them to bypass?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
http://www.cthuugle.com/
The system goes on-line August 4th. Google's Secretive Data Center begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29.
WTF???
The system goes on-line August 4th, 2006. Human decisions are removed from system administration. GooglePlex begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Those cooling towers are huge, and I'm sure that they are cost effectove and work really well.
But i look at them all that heat pouring out and I think its a waste. I hope Google has come sort of secret sterling engine hooked up to a generator in there that could used to turn some of that heat back into electricity...
Y'all do realize that Google is just another name for Cyberdyne, right? And Googleplex is just another word for Skynet.
Isn't anyone worrying about a flood? I can't imagine the expense of loosing all that equipment to water.
"I've said it before and I'll continue to say it, Google has BIG plans that everyone is not piecing together. Long story short, I expect to see Google linux sometime within two years (I'd wager this year). This distro will be intimately linked with the online side of Google for storage and software. This will mean that you can go from your PC at home to any webbrowser on the face of the planet and have all of your information as it would be on your own desktop. ALSO, there's a possiblity of seeing something like Sun has where you can have a desktop open with programs, web pages, and files and then go to another PC and have the same desktop open from either a webbrowser or a future version of Google desktop. What do you think all those mobile computing boxes and dark fiber are for? It's all to make Google local to everyone and very very fast. Wait and see. dont forget the Google PC rumors with Walmart, I'm willing to bet that this will happen or something close to it and what we will see is a computer that boots in less than 30sec (a very stripped down and fast linux distro, perhaps on CF or equivalent) and then jumps onto a highspeed net connection to get on the Google network for software and files." I will add that with stories like this and this it becomes apparent that Google may be close to a work-around to all that pesky net neutrality bullshit.
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
That's why they're so intent on staying in China. They need the supply line. Soon, you'll be addicted to cheap searches and have no interest in paying for better quality ones. Google will have made its fortune by exploiting poor Chinese peasants to carry out your searches for pennies per day.
The first thing that sprang to mind when I saw that picture is what it will look like on the front page of the newspaper when the Columbia floods one of these years.
I know there are benefits of being close (hydroelectric power) or even very close (water cooling) to the river, but do those outweight the risk of said river overflowing into your main server farm?
The Columbia is one of the most dammed rivers in the West, so I'm sure there will be those of you who reply that "It would never overflow there." But what are the worst-case scenarios that are being considered? Do they get as crazy as Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather?" (Though I guess if that comes about, you've got bigger problems than not being able to search Google...)
Was about to make fun of Oregon. Saw this. Changed mind.
After seven and a half million years^W^W^W 0.07 seconds of pondering the question:
And its name is Calculator! Well, who had thought that.
nice to know when I put a mathematical operation into google it'll tell me those answers that much faster!
Unreal. They are going completely vertical, a la Standard Oil at the turn of the last century... controlling all aspects of the means of production -- i.e. you don't just assemble the parts, but you also mine the ore used to make the parts, convert it into steel, own the ships, trains, and trucks to deliver it to the factories -- basically, you own and control everything and buy from nobody. Complete control. Monopoly. Awesome.
Cheap hydro power, good net connectivity, and plenty of admin techs ... the fact that there aren't huge data centre projects like this in Canada is evidence that the government isn't doing something right.
Instead of powering clusters, all that nice hydroelectricity in BC is being used to grow pot. (which arguably powers a different kind of tech innovation, but anyway...)
And I think it sums up just how much some people just don't "get" IT.
Everyone who knows anything about Google knows that they could bloody well arrange their own hoo-hah ceremony if they wanted, but why?
Exactly how would it boost the IT operations, and not make Google management look like attention-seeking wankers, like most of these people involved in "chambers of commerce" (the more pompous, business version of the home owners associations that tend to be nothing more than collections of nosey arseholes).
Te Quiero, Puta!
Is it me or is a datacenter not the type of thing you want to build next to water?
I find it interesting then that they want to build such an infrastructure hub so close to a river that could flood, and an active tectonic zone that provides them both earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. But as long as you've got multiple of these centres, I guess it isn't a big problem.
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
OK, let's say 450,000 servers at 500 watts each (just a guess) + 100 watts of cooling requirements per server (I have no idea). That gives us 250 Megawatts which is the output of a fair sized nuclear power plant. To run queries. That's just really really wierd.
Can it play Global Thermonuclear War?
"To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today." -Isaac Asimov
... when the answer comes back 42.
Today! We didnot like Microsoft for its world domination in OS. Soon Google will dominate IT and soon we might hate them. Through google, information became widely available to the public (e.g. Google Earth) and these are great tools for anything including terrorism. Perhaps they have to be aware of that. They do have advanced solutions, have they forgotten the well being of others? Please google, please consider people who are "opportunist". Information is power and humans are hungry for power. I want my daughter to have a peaceful future and I hope google won't be the tool for anarchy but so far it looks like it.
The world's biggest Counter Strike Server
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
hmmm... may nsa has already colocated their sniffing equipment to check for queries made by people.
probably nobody can confirm or deny that this is going on with google. everybody things here in slashdot google is a saint. but i don't find them different from att, et al.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I have to wonder if this is part of Google's plan to avoid paying the ISP's extortion fees once the tiered internet ramps up. You know, put a containerized datacenter * at every peering point in the US, and then one of these babies in say 8 states in the US. In network terms, you'll then be so close to all netizens that the ISP's won't be able to slow you down, much.
... well, in the future, he thinks Google will become *the* internet. There'll be a power-play of course - a big, probably defiant, act showing the world who's really running things - and then, there'll be the Google internet, running on top of the original internet. In his mind, it'll be faster, simpler, and safer, and (unlike M$), it'll just work.
... and I'm certain Googlers watching us talk about it are laughing (and if they're *not* doing what we think they are, perhaps they're also taking note of where they might go from here).
. html
... Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, NSA having giant datacenters in a small region?
... or simply EMP (a.k.a. e-bomb) ... and with that in mind, I wonder how well these datacenters are hardened against *these* kinds of threats.
In Robert X Cringely's speech at the WebmasterWorld PubCon last November, he said that with Google buying a power plant, dark fiber, and putting together a massive network of insane-powerful datacenters
Most of this is heavy on rumor & speculation, and light on facts
See Robert X Cringely's story from last November: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117
All the same
Can you say "giant freaking target"? Think nuke