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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."
Pretty soon, Google will BE the Internet.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
They grind them up and feed them to new servers and then serve you zombie content with those.
Soylent Blue?
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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?
How many beads do I need to string on my abacus before it becomes slef-aware?
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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.
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
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.