Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?

beat.net writes "Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up: "The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.""

Nice work of fiction

[winkydink]

Has anyone given any thought to how many of these peering points have excess power capacity for 5000 Opterons? Hmmmmm?

Stealing

[Radicode]

That's a nice idea but that thing must need some serious amount of power to run. Add the massive cooling system needed to keep the box runnning without melting. If they intend to just "drop" it anywhere... they have to think about security. You don't want some geek with a saw to steal your 3.5 PB array! Omni

Missing something here...

[w9ofa]

I don't understand how a few boxes full of Opterons automatically means taking over the Internet.

In my opinion, Google has penetrated the American market with its services as much as it can. It is probably looking to other places in the world to prop up its cash flow. You know, like a business, rather than a collection of world-domination-bent nerds?

Re:Stop Google!!

[kc32]

Of course we want another Microsoft. We need something that can compete with MS.

Great

[Kickboy12]

Great Article. It just shows how quickly Google is becoming a global enterprise right under the nose of all the other huge companies such as Microsoft.

Re:Great

[east coast]

Uh, excuse me? Google IS a huge company. Don't fool yourself into thinking this is David vs. Goliath. This is one Goliath fighting for another Goliath's territory.

Don't think that if somehow Google makes MS a lesser force that suddenly the sun is going to come out from the clouds and everyone is going to live happily ever after... Too many people on slashdot already have this attitude and it's an unfortunate one, at best.

Re:Why?

[BasilBrush]

Network latency. You get a faster response from a server in your own locale than on the other side of the world. And if you're doing network applications that are intended to compete with traditional local applications, then you need low latency.

Re:Stop Google!!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM used to be "Microsoft", then Microsoft came along.

Microsoft is now "Microsoft", but Google is coming up fast.

When Google becomes "Microsoft", we'll need another company to take them out.

It's guns vs. armor.

"Always after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again"

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Re:Great

[BasilBrush]

Some people seem to think that being a huge necessarily makes a company evil, or the enemy. But I don't dislike Microsoft because they are a big company. I dislike them because they do dirty tricks to hold technology back; to ensure that their goddamn awful technology succeeds over more promising technology. Google hasn't as yet done that. They've got to where they are now through the excellence of their technology. And they will get my respect for as long as they are like that, no matter how large they get.

The Alternative Re:Google is Skynet?

[hackwrench]

The alternative is everybody running their own stations in a massive wireless mesh network.

Psy-war

[Deinesh]

More than anything else, this seems to be a from of psycological warfare. Can you imagine the feelings of Bill G or Steve B when they read that article?

I mean if you are at Microsoft or Yahoo, where would you throw your money at? Office/Excel/Gamil like AJAX apps, this new 300 Uber Server threat or the next thing some bored reporter comes up with?

I don't know if this is report true or not, but I do know that Google is running a very effective psy-war campaign against their competitors.

Hardware limits

[psavo]

Google's growth was in part made possible by heaps of commodity hardware. Hardware that was originally meant for standard lusers, cheap and unreliable. They built their systems for it and tolerate that. They change lots of haddrives in their datacenters and god knows what else.

What I'm trying to say is that for each of those googlecubes they need staff that regularly changes whatever hardware fails. With 3.5 Petabytes of storage and 5K processors it means that something will fail every single day that beast is powered. All that crammed inside 20/40 feet space (WTF does that mean?) means that heat will kill even more hardware.

So, yeah it should be possible, but not very likely.

Re:Google is Skynet?

[binarybum]

yep, I just entered the posting area to post a comment "skynet anyone?" but your posting confirmed that this was not such an obscure idea.

    all the buzzwords like "dark fiber" "secret underground garages" and "dropped off overnight" and even "peering points" make this sound like a recipe for a very red future.

Re:Cooling 5000 Opterons?

[dmadole]

If an Opteron produces say, on average, 50W heat output (I know this isn't accurate, but just as an example), 5000 Opterons would produce 250kW of heat. That would require an air conditioning unit larger than the building used to house the container.

Hardly -- a kWh is 3413 BTUs and 12,000 BTUs is a refrigerating ton. So they would need about 71 tons of cooling (the name of the unit is derived from the cooling capacity of a ton of ice per day). They make chillers into the hundreds of tons of capacity.

Here is some information on a 75 ton chiller [hvacportablesystems.com]. That's smaller than the shipping container it would be cooling -- a normal shipping container is 40 feet long and about 8 foot square cross-section.

In fact, if there's any truth to this story at all, I bet they fit all the computer gear in the first 22 feet of the container and the chiller in the last 18 feet.

Re:Google is Skynet?

[techrunner]

Today, many are scared of AI for scary but very unlikely reasons. They are scared of a Borg. They are scared that robots will take over the world. They are scared of being secretly controlled by an AI super race.

Much more likely is an AI super corporation. One company discovers AI. This AI is something like google's technology, but 100x stronger. This AI is used to develop even better AI. This companies market cap shoots through the roof as almost all patents and key innovations come from one company. .

Re:The Alternative Re:Google is Skynet?

[Directrix1]

I second this. I am just waiting for the moment when the technology becomes available. Its the way the internet was really intended to be run. Screw ISPs. The internet needs decentralised wireless peering.

Re:Cooling 5000 Opterons?

[Detritus]

Humidity control.

Re:The Alternative Re:Google is Skynet?

[ball-lightning]

This is my thought, make the internet free, let google run this new free internet

Then it's not really free, is it?

Unless you meant free as in beer, but who really cares about that? (Cheap 'net access can be had for 10 dollars a month. If that is too much for you, you've probably got bigger problems).

Re:Hardware limits

[SharpFang]

With 3.5 petabyte storage and 5K processors, plus some smart software, taking offline one CPU or two harddrives will have hardly any impact. And when performance of given container drops by 3% (that is 150 nodes have already failed and are offline) they send someone to replace them. Or even not then, just a single truck running around the country replacing broken nodes during each visit.
Just like painting the Golden Gate bridge. There's a small crew of painters assigned to that work. It takes them 4 years to paint the whole bridge, but when they finish at one end, the other already requires repainting, so they start over. The bridge is never 100% "brand new" painted, but it remains in acceptable state at all times.

Sounds like Cringely saw a Petabox

[Animats]

The Internet Archive's Petabox [archive.org]. is a petabyte of storage in a shipping container. Each rack holds 100 terabytes, and power consumption is 6 KW per rack. Capricorn [capricorn-tech.com] builds them for the Internet Archive.

Sounds like Google is trying that out.

There's nothing that exotic about this. The military builds racks of electronics into shipping containers all the time. It's mostly a cable management and maintenance access problem. You have to be able to do everything from the front of the rack, which requires some design work but isn't rocket science.

Re:5,000 opterons? That'd make a fine...

[jrockway]

By unplugging it.

Re:Scary

[phoenix.bam!]

They don't have control. As long as there is one search company in business Google will not have control. You give them control but competition is so low barrier that google will not be "The One"

The crazy thing is...

[The Real Nem]

The crazy thing is, if it isn't in Google's cache today, it will be in the next couple of days once Google crawls this page.

Re:Google is Skynet?

[Plaid Phantom]

Actually, that's exactly what they're doing. Minus the nuke. I hope.

Re:Google is Skynet?

[Master of Transhuman]

Microsoft has DEMONSTRATED they don't give a shit about anything but money - not advancing technology, not about customers, nothing but money.

Google at least APPEARS to be trying to improve technology FOR its customers.

Whether they will be successful at that, and how they will use that in the future is an open question.

Re:Can't buy latency...

[this great guy]

The speed of light is just too low for Google's AJAX applications to take over the world.

No, you are wrong. Even if Google had only 2 datacenters on the surface of the Earth located at 2 antipodal points, a path from any location to one of the datacenters would always be shorter than 10010 km (mean Earth's circumference divided by 4) and it would take 33 ms for the light to cover this distance. So the RTT would be 66 ms, which is sufficient for Ajax applications.

Though the speed of light contributes a little to the latency between hosts on the Internet, it is primarily caused by the number of hops (routers) between them. So if latency is your problem, you create multiple datacenters mostly to reduce the number of hops, not to reduce the distance that signals have to cover.

Re:So is Wikipedia now Google? Nope, too slow...

[Kent Recal]

Yeah, that's a common problem in our generation.
Grown up with TV and playstation our attention span has degraded to..Oh, something beeped, hold'on a sec.

Re:Why not?

[Jeremi]

many popular pacifist religions, such as Christianity

Heh, good one. I guess it depends on how you define Christianity -- are you referring to the teachings of Mr. Christ, or to the actual beliefs and practices of contemporary people who call themselves Christians? Because the two are widely separated these days... (not that that's anything new [wikipedia.org] of course)

Re:5000 Opterons

[Anonymous Coward]

If these are 870 HE models, it's 22.5 Watts per core. Sounds do-able... And when the Dual Core EE models are out--15 watts/core!