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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.
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.
hold the next football world cup in half as much time as it takes today
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!
They probably use the water for cooling, and maybe hydro power - even if they're not using the hydro from where they are, power has got to be cheaper there, due to lower distribution costs from wherever the nearest hydro plant is.
cheap hydro electric power.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
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.
Sometime ago I created a Google Earth placemark for the Google Datacenter in Groningen, The Netherlands. I go by it every day.
If you kids don't wise up . . . . . you'll end up working in a Googleplex . . . . . DOWN . .BY THE RIVER !"
RIP Chris Farley
Google will use the computer power to calculate how to get programs out of beta.
A network engineer for google has to know their shit. GED and a pulse? Try CCNP and a bachelor's. Not to mention their extensive interview process.
What makes you think I have no ambition?
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.
There is probably cheap readily available electricity nearby, likely in the form of a dam. A dam that prevents flooding.
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.
It doesn't look to me like Google "let" the NYT write this article at all. Noticed who they talked to for this story:
What did Google officially contribute to the article?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
"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...
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.