Power to the computer

Representation of data center in northwestern part of US

Late Sunday morning, I had lunch at Macaroni's - salmon and asparagus. Superbly delicious. I'd taken along a copy of "Wired" from a few months ago to read. A long article on the mechanics of the large web information providers.

What is easily forgotten is the amount of hardware needed to provide services for an entity such as Google.The article mentions that Google has about two dozen data centers spread out from Silicon Valley to Dublin with a low-ball estimate of 450,000 servers. What is even more overlooked is the amount of power needed to run these severs. One of the current trends is the construction of campuses by Google and Microsoft near the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. Where power can be provided at roughly 20% of the cost in Silicon Valley.

Google's 30-acre Oregon facility will create one of the largest data farms in the world. Which will also allow a high degree of scalability. This is the latest change in the architecture of computing. Initially, everything was housed on a mainframe serviced by essentially "dumb" terminals. This was followed by the the client-server network. But now, efforts are centered on the client-data center model - "cloud computing."

Curiously enough as hard drives have become larger and larger, they have become slower in accessing the information. There are physical limits on how fast the arms of a hard disk can seek the appropriate information. Once a hard disk may have been a single-sided plater and a single arm. Now a hard disk may consist of multiple platers accessible from either side from multiple arms. It actually may be easier to pull information from dozens of platters and dozens of arms spread out across the cloud.

Ask.com, is the second fasting-growing search facility after Google. The East Coast branch of Ask.com ran out of power before they ran out of information. So even though they may the second-fasting growing search engine houses, they're in a a facility that is 30% empty. Not only does the facility lack a cheap power source, it struggles to get any further power at all; designed for the more modest needs of Internet switching, the building has already maxed out the local grid.

The article offers a staggering quote : "The planetary machine is on track to use half of all the world's electricity by 2010."

Power from the Columbia River is at best temporary. However, China is in the planning stages of building as many as 30 nuclear plants. An obvious future source for the power starved web facilities.

Anyway, I spent over an hour at lunch engrossed in the article. Which by the way, is on-line at "Wired" 14.10, October 2006, "The Information Factories".

PAX! Erin Go Braugh!