I had the pleasure of helping to build and manage these facilities, both hardware and software, for 5 years. It's nice to see some of Google's real innovations reach the public eye. Some of the smartest folks I ever worked with at the company build absolutely mind blowing tech that the outside never has the opportunity to see or appreciate.
In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.
Reminds me when msn search spent a billion dollars (or whatever was reported) saying we have more pages than google. Google simply updated the number of pages indexed after Microsoft was done huffing and puffing.
It was pretty funny at the time but the lesson wasn't lost on me: With competition, get ahead, stay ahead, and have things already done and implemented so you can announce big accomplishments when it's strategic for you.
> In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.
What if they just plateaued and didn't really go beyond what you had done when you were there, and this is totally accurate to today?
There should be a guide for hacks on how to view articles on a single page. Yeah, wired is easy, there's a link, but often times it calls for a little php knowledge, or viewing in "print" mode. Or something random. Not always complexly obvious, but a list of tricks to try might be handy...
It's a shame that heat is just dumped outside most of the time.
EDIT:
The article talks about Google's impressive technical achievements. But there's a lot of energy that's wasted in industry. I don't mean "used inefficiently" (although that's bad too); I mean actually wasted.
I used to work at a tiny electronic sub-contracting factory. The morning shift would arrive, turn on the air compressor (2 KW), the reflow ovens (10 KW and 12 KW); and the other machines (about 7 KW).
But they'd do that even if the machines were not going to be running. All these KW were being used for no reason at all. And the machines are pretty inefficient anyway. (One of the owners thought powered machines looked more impressive. Energy costs were included in the rent so there was no incentive to think about when the machines were on or off. )
Counting that waste across all the tiny factories in the world, and including all the waste in offices - it's quite a lot.
Low grade heat (< 400 degrees C) is really difficult to do much with. If you happen to have need for it right at the spot where it is generated (basically heating buildings) great.
Otherwise you are pretty much out of luck - The efficiency of energy extraction from a heat engine is thermodynamiclly limited by the difference between the hot and cold sides. And trying to transport it any significant distance ends up being more trouble than its worth as pumping water gets energy intensive very quickly (and air has terrible heat capacity.)
It is a shame. However, it is surely much easier to reduce wasted heat by simply buying more modern, more efficient CPUs that will probably be more powerful.
I wonder why they've mirrored the image (the left side is quite clearly the right side flipped--take a look at the machine identifier labels). What's being hidden?
The blue LEDs in the picture you linked to, indicate that the servers are running smoothly. [1] It's possible that some servers were faulty at the time the picture was taken. More likely, it's to make the image look perfect.
Hi Google Platform people. Very nice work. As you may know, Randall Monroe (of xkcd fame) has recently started a feature called "what if" on their site. I would like to post a question to you along those lines:
What if Google was tasked with building an orbiting datacenter? How about a Dyson ring, or sphere? How would you do it?
If we were to use all matter in the solar system for commodity linux hardware, how much gmail storage would I get? How many flops? And what sorts of computation could you do on this monster?
Google should one-up Amazon and get into the Datacenter As A Service market. Service segments: normal cages (I'd rather lease cages from Colorful Pipes, Inc than Equinix), pay-n-go turnkey same-hardware in 3 georedundant locations, and lease-by-rack in multiples of 10 pre-populated racks (racks specified as compute-only or storage-only with 10G interconnects between racks).
It's doubtful that they could directly compete as is. Amazon has done well with their services because they eat their own dog food. From everything I read Bezos basically forced them to build this system and consume it for Amazon's own needs. Google has never taken this approach with their APIs and the difference shows very clearly when you consume these products.
EC2 is relevant today, but it will become less and less relevant as the Platform-as-a-Service services (S3, SimpleDB, App Engine, Heroku, etc) get better. There will reach a point where fewer and fewer companies will actually use VMs directly. Seems like a reasonable play for Google to sit this round out and focus on winning the next one.
How did Google do this time? Pretty well. Despite the outages in the corporate network, executive chair Eric Schmidt was able to run a scheduled global all-hands meeting. The imaginary demonstrators were placated by imaginary pizza.
How does one decide what will placate imaginary demonstrators? Who calls them off?
For the purposes of tests like that, they probably just wanted to see that "reasonable action was taken", which will (hand-waving) probably take care of most instances of that type. In the event of real demonstrators, it would just be the opening salvo of damage control, but it's too hard to predicate how a crowd of angry people would react past the first move.
I start to be annoyed with the "a power efficiency of 2 is the standard in datacenters". My servers are hosted in a datacenter with a global efficiency of 1.15, proved after more than a year in operation. Announcing that Google is doing 1.2 is simply announcing something wrong and I suppose Google is very happy with this number being provided to the press. It means that some competitor will use it as "Google is the best, they do 1.2, we are at 1.3 we are not too bad", where I bet Google is now near 1.1 or less (they operate without cooling in Belgium for example).
You're right -- those PUE numbers from the article were talking about their PUE at the time. Google's 2012 average PUE across all facilities was 1.12/1.13 with a minimum PUE of 1.09/1.10.
Also, Google puts enormous care into the process of calculating PUE since it's kind of black art and if you aren't careful you'll leave out some aspect of your operation that will mislead you into thinking your PUE is lower than it is.
PUE 2 probably was the standard when Google started building their DCs. There's a wide range between enterprisey DCs that consider going from 2 to 1.8 an epic win and clouds/hosters who are getting below 1.3. Google's PUE data since 2008 is published at http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/...
It is unfortunate (for the rest of us) that datacenter tech is such a competitive advantage for Google. If they were able to share their breakthroughs more readily with others, imagine how much less of the "1.5% of all power globally" datacenters could be using.
[+] [-] fourspace|13 years ago|reply
In fact, while much of the content in the article has been written about before, it's still probably 2-3 years or more behind where Google is actually at. I left in 2010 and did't read about anything I had not experienced.
[+] [-] j45|13 years ago|reply
It was pretty funny at the time but the lesson wasn't lost on me: With competition, get ahead, stay ahead, and have things already done and implemented so you can announce big accomplishments when it's strategic for you.
[+] [-] jedberg|13 years ago|reply
What if they just plateaued and didn't really go beyond what you had done when you were there, and this is totally accurate to today?
[+] [-] sounds|13 years ago|reply
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/ff-inside-googl...
[+] [-] ImprovedSilence|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
EDIT:
The article talks about Google's impressive technical achievements. But there's a lot of energy that's wasted in industry. I don't mean "used inefficiently" (although that's bad too); I mean actually wasted.
I used to work at a tiny electronic sub-contracting factory. The morning shift would arrive, turn on the air compressor (2 KW), the reflow ovens (10 KW and 12 KW); and the other machines (about 7 KW).
But they'd do that even if the machines were not going to be running. All these KW were being used for no reason at all. And the machines are pretty inefficient anyway. (One of the owners thought powered machines looked more impressive. Energy costs were included in the rent so there was no incentive to think about when the machines were on or off. )
Counting that waste across all the tiny factories in the world, and including all the waste in offices - it's quite a lot.
[+] [-] bradleyjg|13 years ago|reply
Otherwise you are pretty much out of luck - The efficiency of energy extraction from a heat engine is thermodynamiclly limited by the difference between the hot and cold sides. And trying to transport it any significant distance ends up being more trouble than its worth as pumping water gets energy intensive very quickly (and air has terrible heat capacity.)
[+] [-] freyfogle|13 years ago|reply
but searching briefly just now I can't find any followup beyond the announcement, not clear if it became reality.
[+] [-] jbri|13 years ago|reply
Fundamentally, all cooling is the process of transferring heat from one place to another.
[+] [-] 7952|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philip1209|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Evbn|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VikingCoder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knowaveragejoe|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squarecat|13 years ago|reply
The only data stored there is probably Doodles...
[+] [-] rpearl|13 years ago|reply
I wonder why they've mirrored the image (the left side is quite clearly the right side flipped--take a look at the machine identifier labels). What's being hidden?
[+] [-] reledi|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/12
[+] [-] cbr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ims|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|13 years ago|reply
What if Google was tasked with building an orbiting datacenter? How about a Dyson ring, or sphere? How would you do it?
If we were to use all matter in the solar system for commodity linux hardware, how much gmail storage would I get? How many flops? And what sorts of computation could you do on this monster?
Please answer! This should be fun...
[+] [-] mseebach|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hurdy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawdawg|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3825|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ludovicurbain|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tipzntrix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cracell|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|13 years ago|reply
How did Google do this time? Pretty well. Despite the outages in the corporate network, executive chair Eric Schmidt was able to run a scheduled global all-hands meeting. The imaginary demonstrators were placated by imaginary pizza.
How does one decide what will placate imaginary demonstrators? Who calls them off?
[+] [-] ubercore|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Loic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rryan|13 years ago|reply
You're right -- those PUE numbers from the article were talking about their PUE at the time. Google's 2012 average PUE across all facilities was 1.12/1.13 with a minimum PUE of 1.09/1.10.
Also, Google puts enormous care into the process of calculating PUE since it's kind of black art and if you aren't careful you'll leave out some aspect of your operation that will mislead you into thinking your PUE is lower than it is.
[+] [-] wmf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francov88|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stock_toaster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|13 years ago|reply
Maybe Google really is Sun v2 ("We are the dot in dot-com" == "Where the Internet lives").
[+] [-] wilfra|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fando|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] no_script|13 years ago|reply
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/
I thought GWT was designed to "compile" rendered pages for a wide variety of browsers and permutations of configurations?
The pictures are very pretty, but that's really awful of them to release a PR site like this, and force users into using JavaScript.
Unforgivable.