April 8, 2007

Google, the Supercomputer

BusinessWeek had a nice collage titled "The many faces of Google" that illustrated 8 facets of Google: search engine, innovation machine, ad broker, media mogul, world's biggest computer, phone company, a provider of better Internet and an artificial intelligence system. While some of these perspectives are speculations or just future plans, it's interesting to see Google as a supercomputer you have limited access to.
Most people still think of Web sites such as Google as places to go. Wrong. That's the old media model. In reality, every click is a command for some computer somewhere in the world. (...) Indeed, CEO Eric Schmidt says that Google essentially is a huge, distributed supercomputer "doing all sorts of things over a fiber-optic network that eventually are services available to end-users." Before long, Googling will mean not just searching for something, but getting ALMOST anything done online.

The New York Times estimated last year that the Googleplex and its server farms contain 450,000 servers. "The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as remarkable as its size. In March 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million Web pages daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft researcher granted anonymity to talk about a detailed tour he was given at one of Google's Silicon Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000."
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 8, 2007 at 8:53 AM

    Google is great... it's true

    ReplyDelete
  2. jossykApril 8, 2007 at 12:31 PM

    Love my google, there is not comparison. Thanks Google for everything.
    JK
    Google life. (TM)

    ReplyDelete
  3. ChrisApril 8, 2007 at 2:23 PM

    It seems to me that there's reason for concern about Google with respect to it's ambitions of being, "the OS of the internet."

    I love Google as much as the next net-head, but as the network and the computer converge, it stands to reason that "open source" should scale to our webtops too.

    After all, if it wasn't for "open source" there would be no Google and there would be no Internet!!

    I, for one, would like to see what's running under the hood behind those white search boxes that increasingly, literally, determine what everything means....

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  4. Jakub SzestowickiApril 9, 2007 at 6:53 AM

    "450,000 servers" - WOW, huge amount
    People at Google do a great job :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousOctober 27, 2007 at 12:03 PM

    450 000 servers - it is old information. How much now, 500 000, 600 000 ? :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. ronalooAugust 20, 2010 at 8:05 AM

    what can i say.. there should be some kind of a control to this thing... many people use it for purpose too.

    thats the thing google should be working on - not providing services to terrorists and nutheads

    also, google can be use for hacking in many ways. it just depends if u are using mind and abilities right.
    the net with google and stuff is just all a big juicy fat pussy waiting to be violated and exploited.

    ReplyDelete

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