The world's second biggest supercomputer?

April 30, 2004 3:00 PM

How many systems does Google have? It depends on how you look at their S-1 filing and estimate their buying patterns... any way you look at it there's some serious computing power there.
posted by clevershark (8 comments total)

I'm not sure I see any reason for assuming that these machines cluster in any meaningful way on such a large scale, and presumably many of these boxes are dedicated web or database nodes that don't participate in spidering or link analysis. I'd hold off on the "biggest supercomputer" talk.

It's kind of interesting, though not really meaningful in this context, to note how geographically diverse Google's network is. They have servers in ten data centers, spread across the US.
posted by mote at 3:35 PM on April 30, 2004

Do ya think they're all PowerMac G5s?
posted by Sfving at 3:41 PM on April 30, 2004

Sfving, the time i got to see their data center, back when they had a mere 10k servers, they were using rackable hardware.
the rackable website says they still are.
posted by dolface at 3:56 PM on April 30, 2004

LUCKY! Give me one!!
posted by Hildago at 4:29 PM on April 30, 2004

How many systems does Google have?

One. It's just highly distributed and has a fuck of a lot of computers in it.
posted by George_Spiggott at 5:48 PM on May 1, 2004

A month ago the NYTimes say that Google have 100,000 computers but it's not backed up.

The company stopped giving updates on the size of its computing resources in 2001. But several people with knowledge of the system said it consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks, these people said, making it what many consider the largest computing system in the world.

posted by holloway at 1:13 AM on May 2, 2004

holloway: I followed the link but couldn't find the mention. Maybe there's a page 2 I'm missing :) Either way, the more than 54k servers still fits within my estimates (yes, the fp link is to my site).

What I was trying to arrive at was a good ballpark. I think there is general agreement now that it's more than 10k machines. All the figures I've heard before have been between 10k and 100k. With the estimates, I was trying to figure out which figure is more real.
posted by TNLNYC at 6:43 AM on May 3, 2004

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/sad/30091481.html classified ad for Google: Data Center Technician in Reston, VA, which says : "Help Google build and maintain its Linux cluster consisting of more than 10,000 servers."
posted by crunchland at 6:55 AM on May 3, 2004