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And you thought computers were getting smaller!!; ...Google plans uber-super-computer.
Topic Started: Jun 13 2006, 07:56 PM (161 Views)
The 89th Key
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/13/business/search.php

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.
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Kincaid
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HOLY CARP!!!
I lived from age 3 thru high school in The Dalles. I am so pissed off to hear that housing prices have jumped 40%. In 1979 we sold our 6000 sq ft house for $100,000. It was later turned into a bed & breakfast and then back again into a private residence. I once saw it for sale for 1 mil. Not sure what it is worth now.

Anyway, windswept is right. When I went back for my 10 year reunion I remembered why I didn't want to live there anymore. Drove in air-conditioned comfort on an August afternoon. Got out and was blasted in the face by 95 degree wind blowing a constant 30 mph!
Kincaid - disgusted Republican Partisan since 2006.
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George K
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Finally
On this day in history:

UNIVAC COMPUTER DEDICATED:
June 14, 1951

On June 14, 1951, the U.S. Census Bureau dedicates UNIVAC, the world's first
commercially produced electronic digital computer. UNIVAC, which stood for
Universal Automatic Computer, was developed by J. Presper Eckert and John
Mauchly, makers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
These giant computers, which used thousands of vacuum tubes for computation,
were the forerunners of today's digital computers.The search for mechanical
devices to aid computation began in ancient times. The abacus, developed in
various forms by the Babylonians, Chinese, and Romans, was by definition the
first digital computer because it calculated values by using digits. A
mechanical digital calculating machine was built in France in 1642, but a 19th
century Englishman, Charles Babbage, is credited with devising most of the
principles on which modern computers are based. His "Analytical Engine," begun
in the 1830s and never completed for lack of funds, was based on a mechanical
loom and would have been the first programmable computer.By the 1920s, companies
such as the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) were supplying
governments and businesses with complex punch-card tabulating systems, but these
mechanical devices had only a fraction of the calculating power of the first
electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). Completed by
John Atanasoff of Iowa State in 1939, the ABC could by 1941 solve up to 29
simultaneous equations with 29 variables. Influenced by Atanasoff's work,
Presper Eckert and John Mauchly set about building the first general-purpose
electronic digital computer in 1943. The sponsor was the U.S. Army Ordnance
Department, which wanted a better way of calculating artillery firing tables,
and the work was done at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC, which stood for
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was completed in 1946 at a cost
of nearly $500,000. It took up 15,000 feet, employed 17,000 vacuum tubes, and
was programmed by plugging and replugging some 6,000 switches. It was first used
in a calculation for Los Alamos Laboratories in December 1945, and in February
1946 it was formally dedicated.Following the success of ENIAC, Eckert and
Mauchly decided to go into private business and founded the Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corporation. They proved less able businessmen than they were
engineers, and in 1950 their struggling company was acquired by Remington Rand,
an office equipment company. On June 14, 1951, Remington Rand delivered its
first computer, UNIVAC I, to the U.S. Census Bureau. It weighed 16,000 pounds,
used 5,000 vacuum tubes, and could perform about 1,000 calculations per second.
On November 4, 1952, the UNIVAC achieved national fame when it correctly
predicted Dwight D. Eisenhower's unexpected landslide victory in the
presidential election after only a tiny percentage of the votes were in.UNIVAC
and other first-generation computers were replaced by transistor computers of
the late 1950s, which were smaller, used less power, and could perform nearly a
thousand times more operations per second. These were, in turn, supplanted by
the integrated-circuit machines of the mid-1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, the
development of the microprocessor made possible small, powerful computers such
as the personal computer, and more recently the laptop and hand-held computers.
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