[Infowarrior] - Google's not-so-very-secret weapon

Tue Jun 13 22:37:31 EDT 2006

Google's not-so-very-secret weapon
By John Markoff and Saul Hansell The New York Times
Published: June 13, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/13/business/search.php

THE DALLES, Oregon On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is
working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of
Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two
football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the
sky.

The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of
what may soon be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, helping to
supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search
queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia
along the Oregon-Washington border - at the intersection of low-cost
electricity and readily accessible data networking - is the backdrop for a
multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will
determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are building giant data centers
upstream in Washington State, 130 miles to the north. But Google is doing
something radically different here. The very need for two cooling towers,
each connected to a football field-sized data center, is evidence of its
extraordinary ambition.

As imposing as Google's new Oregon data center is, when it opens it will
only a piece of a worldwide computing system known as the Googleplex, which
is tied together by strands of fiber optic cables. A similar computing
center has recently been completed in Atlanta.

"Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden
asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and the cofounder of
Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and
agricultural outpost 80 miles, or 130 kilometers, east of Portland, Oregon,
has been a closely guarded corporate secret. Many local officials in The
Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could
not comment on the Google data center project, referred to locally as
Project 02, because they signed confidentiality agreements with the company
last year.

"No one says the 'G' word," said Diane Sherwood, who, as executive director
of the Port of Klickitat, Washington, directly across the river from The
Dalles, is not bound by such agreements. "It's a little bit like 'He-Who-
Must-Not-Be-Named' in Harry Potter."

Local residents are at once enthusiastic and puzzled about their affluent
but secretive new neighbor, a successor to the aluminum manufacturers who
once came seeking the inexpensive power that flows readily from the dams
holding back this powerful river.

The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real
estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200
permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this
year.

"We're trying to organize our chamber ambassadors to have a ribbon-cutting
ceremony, and they're trying to keep us all away," said Susan Huntington,
executive director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce. "Our two cultures
aren't matching very well."

Culture clashes may be an inevitable byproduct of the urgency with which the
search-engine war is being waged.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out
their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a vast variety
of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online
commerce. Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it
would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort
to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run
to at least $1.5 billion.

Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is
foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest
academic research, that can process more data, faster and cheaper than its
rivals.

The rate at which the Google computing system has grown is as astounding as
its size. In March of 2001, when the company was serving about 70 million
Web page views daily, it had 8,000 computers, according to a Microsoft
researcher who was given a detailed tour of one of the company's Silicon
Valley computing centers. By 2003 the number had grown to 100,000.

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big
the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000
servers spread in at least 25 locations around the world. The company has
major operations in Ireland, and is building significant facilities in China
and Russia. Connecting these centers is a high- capacity data network that
the company has assembled over the past few years.

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes
to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of
light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant
processing power close to all of its users.

Microsoft's Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers
and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its
most aggressive forecast, according to a company document.

Computer scientists and computer networking experts caution that it is
impossible to compare the two companies' efforts directly. Yet it is the way
in which Google has built its globally distributed network that illustrates
the daunting task of its competitors in catching up.

"Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who
was a founder of the 1990s online service @Home, referring to the robotic
species on Star Trek that was assembled from millions of individual
components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes
applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google."

John Markoff reported from The Dalles and Saul Hansell from New York.

Google Earth upgraded

Google has released a major upgrade to its Google Earth software, which
gives users a three-dimensional satellite view of the world, The Associated
Press reported from Mountain View, California.

The company said four times more land would be covered in the latest version
of its free Google Earth software, enabling about one-third of the world's
population to obtain an aerial view of their homes and neighborhood.

The software also is being offered in German, Spanish, French and Italian,
and will work on computers using the Linux operating system for the first
time. More than 100 million people have downloaded Google Earth software
since it was offered a year ago, according to figures released by the
company for the first time on Monday.

Meanwhile, Google's online mapping service for finding directions and
locating businesses has emerged as a major challenger to the longtime
leaders in the category, AOL's Mapquest and Yahoo. Google Maps attracted 26
million U.S. visitors in May to rank third behind Mapquest at 43.5 million
visitors and Yahoo at 26.1 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.