Fascinating and detailed post about Google’s datacenter, now 100,000 servers strong. “One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the isles of Google’s data center with a shopping cart full of spare disk drives instead of vacuum tubes.” I didn’t realize that Google’s “Snippets” service requires them to store the entire web in RAM. Speculation about the ultimate capabilities of such an unimaginably huge cluster computer. A commenter wonders “How many servers would you need to emulate the human brain?”
Thanks Ludovic.
Music: Dils :: Mr. Big
Man, if that thing becomes intelligent we’re all dooooomed!
-or-
If it became infected by a proprietary virus we’d all be dooooomed!
It’s the Borg.
I somehow feel very, very, small working on my G3 iMac with 1GB of RAM.
The images of the operators running around this giant hive maintaining the machine reminds me of a species of trophical ant that does its own farming — swarming over its harvest maintaining/feeding in a giant coordinated mass.
Very cool.