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Google Envisions 10 Million Servers

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."

16 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty soon... by El_Smack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.

    --


    There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
    1. Re:Pretty soon... by mi · · Score: 3, Funny

      Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.

      At least, we aren't going to have to go through the pains of upgrading to IPv6 in that case... 2^32 covers 10 million like bull covers a rabbit...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    2. Re:Pretty soon... by decipher_saint · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's the plan, I thought:
      1. Cache all websites
      2. Cache all users
      3. Disconnect the meat beings

      Oop, said too much!

      --
      crazy dynamite monkey
  2. Re:fastest site on the internet gets faster? by Yvan256 · · Score: 4, Funny

    They grind them up and feed them to new servers and then serve you zombie content with those.

  3. 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.

  4. Re:fastest site on the internet gets faster? by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Funny

    Soylent Blue?

  5. Boorgle by Toe,+The · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's pronounced Boorgle... and resistance is futile.

  6. new ad campaign? by cashman73 · · Score: 3, Funny

    They should put that on their website,... before long it'll be: "Google: Billions and Billions of Servers." Of course, McDonald's just might have a problem with that,...

  7. 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.

  8. 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?

    1. Re:The Internet isn't that big. by lordandmaker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd hazard a guess that google gets a tad more connections than archive.org

  9. Enough? by rwv · · Score: 3, Funny

    1981: 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

    2009: 10 Million servers ought to be enough for any company.

  10. 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
    1. Re:The NSA has Google beat... by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Funny
      Emphasis mine (parent's emphasis discarded)

      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.

      Stupid non-standard unit. According to the official Salt Lake City Energy Blueprint, SLC has an annual electricity usage of 3.3 billion kWh, of which 17% is residential. This works out to 64 MW, or about 6 POOTs (Power Output of Togo), which is the accepted standard non-standard unit for power in this order of magnitude.

      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.

      Assuming that they are referring to area, and not volume -- the Alamodome is about 40,000 square meters... the standard non-standard unit for area of this magnitude is American football fields (NOT random stadia) including endzones, which is 5351 square meters -- thus this data archive will be approximately 7+ football fields.

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

      Yes, it would be interesting to know how much data they will be storing in this facility.

      But, sheesh, I understand not wanting to use standard units as they may just confuse the scientifically illiterate... but if the NSA or some other source is going to use non-standard units, they should at least use standard non-standard units like POOTs or football fields.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  11. Re:10 Million? by mcgrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How many beads do I need to string on my abacus before it becomes slef-aware?

  12. 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.