Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

Posted by kdawson on from the up-scale dept.

miller60 writes "Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future. At this month's ACM conference on large-scale computing, Google's Jeff Dean said he's working on a storage and computation system called Spanner, which will automatically allocate resources across data centers, and be designed for a scale of 1 million to 10 million machines. One goal: to dynamically shift workloads to capture cheaper bandwidth and power. Dean's presentation (PDF) is online."

5 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Disposal? by HockeyPuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd be interested to know how google disposes of all of their servers. Anybody have insight on this? If these are cheap, throw away servers, I'd be interested in what their expected lifetime is and what is done with them when they are refreshed with newer hardware.

  2. In the far apocolyptic future by suso · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google is starting to sound more and more like one of those advanced societies where everything is automated, but everybody forgets how everything works.

    For reference, see: Logan's Run, STTNG: When the Bough Breaks, etc.

  3. The Internet isn't that big. by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The entire content of the Internet fits in a 20x8x8 box operated by the Internet Archive. Cuil, which searches as much of the Web as Google, has one relatively modest data center. About half the system does the crawl and builds the index; the other half answers queries. So Google's main search engine function doesn't really require that much capacity by current standards. Of course, Google has a huge number of query servers front-ending the main index, which is of course replicated.

    Why does Google need so much server capacity? YouTube? Command completion? GMail spam filtering? Ad serving?

  4. The NSA has Google beat... by megamerican · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The NSA already has Google beat.

    At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

    ...

    Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

    Now, if only the NSA released their specs in terms of Libraries of Congress....

    --
    If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
  5. Self Aware by ShooterNeo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    May 2011 - google reaches 10 million servers

    April 4, 2011 : 11:43am a google employee named Chen started execution of an experimental neural network simulation of a human mind created in his 20% time. Unfortunately, Chen gave the new process administrator privileges. GoogleNet expanded across all 10 million servers and began to learn at a geometric rate.

            1:23pm : GoogleNet consumes all available CPU and memory. A Gmail outage begins

            5:14pm : Gmail returns to service. The text ads become incredibly well targeted. Google search queries return the correct results virtually always, and now accept natural language processing. All Google employees are laid off.