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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.'
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
Sounds like an offshoot of Colossus: The Forbin Project.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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!
cheap hydro electric power.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
According to TFA, the data center does not show up on Google Earth.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Yeah, it's good to see new money/employers coming into smaller towns/cities, but...
Did you also notice in TFA that local real estate prices are climbing signifigantly?
I just spent a week in Alberta, and yeah, it's booming, wages are rising, anyone who is capable of working can have their pick of jobs, BUT appartment buildings all have a waiting list (and rents have spiked), and the price of houses has increased by 60% in a year. People are getting into bidding wars for 600SQ ft houses, and paying over 200k (cdn) for them.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Google Earth isn't a live feed. It's assembled from numerous photos of varying age and quality. Next time a satelite takes a snap, they'll update it. It's not like they're trying to keep it secret, unlike some of the other mysterious black boxes on Google Earth.
Nearest hydroplant...is probably .5 mile or so up-river from them.
Yes, I'd agree having 1.7 sustained non-fossil-fuel dependent megawatts on the local grid probably made the decision easier for them.
1)Power. The area is on the Columbia river, which has some very impressive Dams. Very cheap power up there. There is a reason that there used to be 2 Aluminum plants there, the Power is freaking cheap compared to California and elsewhere. Along with the Power comes the proximitiy to water (my stupid guess) the columbia stays pretty cool year round, think water cooling for some of the equipment. Much cheaper than AC, and cold year round.
2)Fiber. Bonneville Power Administration (BPA, Runs all the dams) has run Fiber all over the states of OR and WA to support the Power grid it has put in place. And as long as they were running one fiber, might as well pull 100. Because of the BPA, there is Dark fiber all over Oregon and Washington, especially to rural communities. They have 2 companies managing all that dark fiber for them. In washington, its NoaNet and in Oregon its LS Networks. Then take a look at this map and notice how many oversea fibers come ashore in oregon. Most of Aisa, Hawaii, Austrailia, and Alaska. That makes Oregon a fairly "close" location to many other nations.
3)Brains. The Dalles is 80 miles east of Portland. Portland is crazy for Open source, thats where OSDL are, (including Linus!), several universities, intel has 2 fabs there that hire 15,000 engineers, etc. Lots of smart, educated engineers an hour away..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
For those of you not familiar with best Apple 2gs game ever see the wiki article on The Oregon Trail.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
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.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/14/google_ear th_competition_results/page9.html
Some other pages from that "Black Helicopter" compo show up some other mysterious black boxes. Mostly it's just military sites seen from above.
No surprise - virtually nothing in that area shows up on Google Earth - it's a blur of low res images across the entire region of the state. Not to mention the datacenter may not be visible because the imagery is too old. The datacenter was only built in the last year or so - and much of Googles lowres imagery is much older. The site can be plainly seen in the vicinity of 45.630N 121.203W.