From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Mon Apr 05 2004 - 21:47:02 MDT
There is book I thumbed through at Borders called "Google Hacks".
Looked like a great read. Written by Google insiders.
Walter
rhinoceros wrote:
> This is recent entry from a blog written by Rich Skrent (http://www.skrenta.com/)
>
> The Secret Source of Google's Power
> http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html
>
> Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring.
>
> No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the *platform* that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else.
>
> <snip>
>
> Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.
>
> <snip>
>
> What are all those OS Researchers doing at Google?
>
> Rob Pike has gone to Google. Yes, that Rob Pike -- the OS researcher, the member of the original Unix team from Bell Labs. This guy isn't just some labs hood ornament; he writes code, lots of it. Big chunks of whole new operating systems like Plan 9.
>
> Look at the depth of the research background of the Google employees in OS, networking, and distributed systems. Compiler Optimization. Thread migration. Distributed shared memory.
>
> I'm a sucker for cool OS research. Browsing papers from Google employees about distributed systems, thread migration, network shared memory, GFS, makes me feel like a kid in Tomorrowland wondering when we're going to Mars. Wouldn't it be great, as an engineer, to have production versions of all this great research.
>
> Google engineers do!
>
> Competitive Advantage
>
> Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
>
> While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
>
> This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
>
> ----
> This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2004 board on Church of Virus BBS.
> <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=30134>
> ---
> To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "Pursue the small utopias... nature, music, friendship, love" --Kupferberg-- --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Apr 05 2004 - 21:48:13 MDT