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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
... 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.
They store all our search informaiton and personal details.....
Global Warming anyone ? No heaters required there.
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?
Easier job...network operations at a google server farm. Still awesome?
does it flood?
Perhaps they are using the river water for their cooling towers?
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.
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.
It is shaped like a giant hand?
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.
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
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.
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.
Because they need a way to cool the servers?
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
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
I question the choice of locations. It is asking for a disaster. People have short memories and shorter vision. They must have lots of redundancy and a hell of a lot of insurance.
Google will use the computer power to calculate how to get programs out of 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)
... 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
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...
"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
"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.
There is probably cheap readily available electricity nearby, likely in the form of a dam. A dam that prevents flooding.
......
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...
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.
Yeah but Edward Diego, had to just hire a damn hacker to take out the ethics...
Now look at what we get... a new dominating AI, who now has a supercooled complex of computers to overtake. I welcome my new Google AI overlord.
"Don't Forget to Salt the Fries"
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
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.
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!"
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."
befo
Lets get a pool going on when Googleplex becomes self aware.
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
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.
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...
Actually it's The Dalles, not The Dalls.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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;
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...
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.
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
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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.