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Pictures of googles servers?

B

BigToque

Lifer
I swear I saw pictures of googles servers posted here some tme ago... maybe it was nVidia?

does anyone remember this?
 
I read an article recently that said Google designs their system so they have 3 racks for a google "chunk" and the data is spread out over the disk arrays on those racks. Of course there are many many chunks. They fit 80 servers in a regular rack. That is insane. If you work in a data center, you probably know most racks in an average place have 8-12 servers.
 
Originally posted by: SurgicalShark
I think that pic is old, one shown in CBS 60 Min had Google written on each of them...and were different (from layman's view)
Click to expand...


Yeah, in the pictures they showed of the servers, they seemed to be using the style they sell for businesses like this
 
Ummmm.... doesn't Google use Akamai for their server equipment / web hosting now? I would have sworn that it does...
 
on 60 minutes featuring google, they showed the new google server room. i can't say i was very focused on it (i still want to watch it -- there's a thread on this here somewhere) as i was eating with friends at a restaurant, but the machines currently running the google engine looked line a bunch of sun sparcs stacked up together.
 
http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/How_many_Google_machines


An interesting tidbit coming out of the Google S-1 filing is that they have spent about $250 million on hardware equipment. From there, we can get a few guesses at the magnitude of the Google system. Based on quick back of the envelope calculations, it looks like Google is managing between 45,000 and 80,000 servers. Here's how I arrived at this conclusion:

According to calculations by the IEE, in a paper about the Google cluster, a rack with 88 dual-CPU machines used to cost about $278,000. If you divide the $250 million figure from the S-1 filing by $278,000, you end up with a bit over 899 racks. Assuming that each rack holds 88 machines, you end up with 79,000 machines.

However, one must recognize that equipment is not all CPUs. As a result, you must discount the figure of $250 million to account for routers, firewalls, machines for employees, etc... So let's assume for a minute that only about $200 million is going to the CPUs. That still leaves us with 719 racks or a bit over 63,000 machines.

Even if we discount other equipment to be costing $100 million, we end up with a bit over 31,654 machines on 359 racks.

So how much processing power is that? Well, once again, the Google cluster document provides some interesting tidbits. Per the document, the racks that were used were

88 dual-CPU 2Ghz Intel Xeon servers with 2 Gbytes of RAM and an 80-Gbyte hard disk.


That means that, on the low end, the Google cluster has the following stats:

* 359 racks
* 31,654 machines
* 63,184 CPUs
* 126,368 Ghz of processing power
* 63,184 Gb of RAM
* 2,527 Tb of Hard Drive space


In the middle range of my estimates, the cluster would have:

* 719 racks
* 63,272 machines
* 126,544 CPUs
* 253,088 Ghz of processing power
* 126,544 Gb of RAM
* 5,062 Tb of Hard Drive space


And on the high end of my estimates:

* 899 racks
* 79,112 machines
* 158,224 CPUs
* 316,448 Ghz of processing power
* 158,224 Gb of RAM
* 6,180 Tb of Hard Drive space



Assuming that the 1Ghz chip is going at about a third the gigaflops of a 2Ghz processor (3.3Gflops), we can then guess at the size of the Google supercomputer. Just for the sake of argument, let's go with 1 Gigaflop per processor. This means that the Google supercomputer has about 126 teraflops of power on the low end of my estimates, 253 teraflops on the middle end, and 316 teraflops on the high end. This would easily put it on top of the list of fastest computers in the world.

Any way you slice it, that's a lot of powe
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by: tami
on 60 minutes featuring google, they showed the new google server room. i can't say i was very focused on it (i still want to watch it -- there's a thread on this here somewhere) as i was eating with friends at a restaurant, but the machines currently running the google engine looked line a bunch of sun sparcs stacked up together.
Click to expand...

They use generic x86. Non-RAID, non-redundant power supplies, etc. They expect hardware to fail and it's designed into their system.
 
Originally posted by: cmv
Originally posted by: GeekDrew
Ummmm.... doesn't Google use Akamai for their server equipment / web hosting now? I would have sworn that it does...
Click to expand...

No.
Click to expand...


Actually yes, they do.

But I'm sure they still have a HUGE server farm at home in Mountain View.

Akamai is good for redundancy, and speeding up response times, normally slowed by the distance from the server..
 
Originally posted by: dawks
Originally posted by: cmv
Originally posted by: GeekDrew
Ummmm.... doesn't Google use Akamai for their server equipment / web hosting now? I would have sworn that it does...
Click to expand...

No.
Click to expand...


Actually yes, they do.

But I'm sure they still have a HUGE server farm at home in Mountain View.

Akamai is good for redundancy, and speeding up response times, normally slowed by the distance from the server..
Click to expand...

Doh! I am wrong... That is very interesting though. I always thought Akamai only did image/file caching to speed up page loads. Maybe they have branched out over the years.

edit:
http://www.infoworld.com/artic.../HNakamaioutage_1.html

So they host DNS. Cool but not Google hardware that we are talking about here.
 
Originally posted by: cmv
Originally posted by: dawks
Originally posted by: cmv
Originally posted by: GeekDrew
Ummmm.... doesn't Google use Akamai for their server equipment / web hosting now? I would have sworn that it does...
Click to expand...

No.
Click to expand...


Actually yes, they do.

But I'm sure they still have a HUGE server farm at home in Mountain View.

Akamai is good for redundancy, and speeding up response times, normally slowed by the distance from the server..
Click to expand...

Doh! I am wrong... That is very interesting though. I always thought Akamai only did image/file caching to speed up page loads. Maybe they have branched out over the years.

edit:
http://www.infoworld.com/artic.../HNakamaioutage_1.html

So they host DNS. Cool but not Google hardware that we are talking about here.
Click to expand...

A LOT of companies use akamai solely for DNS including MS
 
dont they just use standard boxes with IDE drives and such, and have an operating system written specifically for failure management? where did i read that article..

they have so much failsafe/redundancy its not even funny.
 
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