Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor

[Jennifer Dozar <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Microsoft writes their own software??? i know they steal and "buy" a lot
of software and then do their own means to it.... 

I"m kind of joking... well partially NOT but i am kind of joking...

On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 04:58:48PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
> Maybe they were trying to be fair and balanced when they interviewed Bill 
> Gates for this article, but to me it came off as silly and a waste of 
> space.  Not surprisingly, Gates pretends that Microsoft is similar to 
> Google.  The reality is that Microsoft does not innovate and Google is all 
> about innovation.  This is a pretty good article about Google though. 
> --Mike
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/technology/03google.html
> 
> N.Y. Times
> July 3, 2006
> 
> A Search Engine That's Becoming an Inventor
> 
> By SAUL HANSELL and JOHN MARKOFF
> 
> When Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley 
> garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own 
> computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers. They wanted to 
> save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers 
> that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from 
> traditional manufacturers.
> 
> Google no longer needs to pinch pennies. It is a solid member of the 
> Fortune 500 with $9 billion in cash. Still, it is stubbornly sticking to 
> its do-it-yourself approach to technology. Even as it spends more than 
> $1.5 billion this year on operations centers and technology, most of the 
> hundreds of thousands of servers it will deploy are being custom-made 
> based on Google's own eccentric designs.
> 
> To be closer to its users and speed response time, it is building a 
> worldwide string of data centers, including a huge site in The Dalles, 
> Ore., with technologies it designed to reduce its ravenous need for 
> electricity. These computers in turn use software developed with advanced 
> tools that Google also designed itself. There are signs that Google is 
> even preparing to create its own custom microchips.
> 
> "Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," 
> said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. "They are 
> building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost 
> unimaginable." He said he believed that Google was the world's 
> fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and 
> I.B.M.
> 
> Google's biggest rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, certainly write much of 
> their own software, and they work to configure their computers and data 
> centers to their own needs. But they largely buy machines from existing 
> manufactures like Dell, Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems.
> 
> "At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said 
> Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to 
> design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular 
> Web site? It is very difficult to do both."
> 
> Google, in fact, has decided it will do both. In many ways, it still has 
> the head of a graduate-school project grafted onto the body of a 
> multinational corporation. The central tenet of its strategy is that its 
> growing cadre of world-class computer scientists can design a network of 
> machines that can store and process more information more efficiently than 
> anyone else.
> 
> Mr. Reynolds estimated that Google's computing costs are half those of 
> other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate 
> technology users.
> 
> Google will not comment on its costs, but it does claim an advantage. "We 
> don't think our competitors can deploy systems cheaper, faster or at 
> scale," Alan Eustace, Google's vice president for research and systems 
> engineering, told analysts in March. "That will give us a two-, three-, 
> five-year lead."
> 
> Despite those boasts, some argue that Google's home-brew approach is 
> unnecessary and inefficient, a headstrong indulgence masked for now by the 
> growth and profitability of its advertising business. And Google's rivals 
> say their networks are plenty efficient and powerful.
> 
> "Google doesn't have anything magic here," Bill Gates, the Microsoft 
> chairman, said in an interview. "We spend a little bit more per machine. 
> But to do the same tasks, we have less machines."
> 
> Google is notoriously secretive about its technology. Yet it also has 
> published papers on some of its developments and been granted patents on 
> others. These, along with the public statements of Google executives and 
> interviews with current and former employees, vendors and other technology 
> executives, paint a picture of a company devoted to pushing the boundaries 
> of modern computer science, and applying those concepts on a vast scale.
> 
> "Google took the best ideas from the supercomputer research community and 
> wove them into a working system," said Stephen E. Arnold, a technology 
> consultant to investors and the author of "The Google Legacy" 
> (Infonortics, 2005), a book on Google's technology.
> 
> Some of its innovations are designed to wring pennies from its growing 
> spending on technology. Last year, it was granted a patent (06906920) on a 
> "drive-cooling baffle," meant to funnel air into a rack of computers held 
> together with Velcro, a Google design signature.
> 
> But some innovations are bolder, like a series of software tools that 
> simplify the way it can divide a problem to be handled by thousands of 
> processors simultaneously, an approach called parallel processing.
> 
> One such program, called MapReduce, is based on ideas discussed in 
> computer science literature for decades, according to Urs Hölzle, Google's 
> senior vice president for operations. "What surprised us was how useful it 
> turned out to be in our environment," he said.
> 
> MapReduce, he said, "allows Joe Schmo software engineer to process large 
> amounts of data and take advantage of our infrastructure."
> 
> Mr. Arnold, the consultant, said these tools created a significant cost 
> advantage. "If you talk to guys who work in massively parallel computing 
> operations, as much as 30 percent of their coding time is spent trying to 
> figure out how to get the thing to run," he said.  Google "has figured out 
> how they can reduce a lot of the hassle and work of creating parallel 
> applications."
> 
> Mr. Gates acknowledged that MapReduce was a significant technology, but he 
> asserted that Microsoft was building its own parallel processing software, 
> opening another front in the technological war between the two companies.
> 
> "They did MapReduce; we have this thing called Dryad that's better," Mr. 
> Gates said. "But they'll do one that's better."
> 
> Moreover, Google's focus on building general purpose tools and systems is 
> different from that of most companies, which develop systems tailored to 
> specific applications. And it is building these systems rapidly, with the 
> billions of dollars in cash it generates and the thousands of engineers it 
> hires each year. It hopes that it can build a lead that will allow it to 
> create products that do more, for less money, than its rivals.
> 
> "If they can get a 30 percent cost advantage, in operating a service on 
> the Internet that is a huge difference," said John M. Lervik, the chief 
> executive of Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian search company.
> 
> Google's academic approach can be traced not only to its founders' 
> graduate work in computer science, but even to their early home life, Mr. 
> Arnold said, noting that Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had come from families with 
> expertise in computer science and mathematics.
> 
> "The stuff they did in 1996 to 1998 was not as immature as it should have 
> been," he said of the Google founders. He said that told him the two men 
> learned a lot "when their parents were talking at the kitchen table."
> 
> By the time Mr. Page and Mr. Brin were designing Google, parallel 
> processing was more than an academic dream; it was enabled on a large 
> scale by the low prices of processors, memory and disk drives used to make 
> personal computers. These components were hardly of the highest quality 
> and could be counted on to fail often.
> 
> Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that 
> parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify 
> assembly -- and reduce the presumed repair time -- by not fastening 
> components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. 
> This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.
> 
> "Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do," Mr. Hölzle said in a 
> speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is 
> reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of 
> reliability from hardware to software -- individual hardware components 
> can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to 
> other machines.
> 
> For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File 
> System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have 
> to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means 
> that it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other 
> companies do.
> 
> Another system, called the Google Work Queue, allows a big pool of servers 
> to be assigned to various tasks as needed and reassigned to other projects 
> later. This concept, called "virtualization," has become a trend among 
> large data center operators, which also want to reduce the expense of 
> having separate servers dedicated to each system. But most companies buy 
> commercial software to track which computers are doing what, a complex 
> process.
> 
> While Google's servers are built on inexpensive parts, the designs it uses 
> have been modified every year or so, to improve their efficiency and 
> increasingly to customize them to Google's applications. The current 
> generation uses the powerful Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, 
> which uses less power than the Intel chips Google had used.
> 
> Google is among Advanced Micro's five largest clients, and the largest 
> that does not make computers to resell, according to a semiconductor 
> industry executive with knowledge of Advanced Micro's business.
> 
> Google is increasingly doing business with Sun Microsystems as well. Sun, 
> known for systems that are both reliable and expensive, would not seem a 
> natural match for a company that emphasizes economy and self-sufficiency. 
> But Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, is a former Sun executive, 
> and Sun has developed a new microchip that is especially efficient in 
> electricity use.
> 
> Moreover, Google increasingly needs systems that are less likely to fail 
> than those it uses for its search engine in order to handle important 
> information, like e-mail and payments in its new Google Checkout service.
> 
> Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own 
> microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for 
> the Digital Equipment Corporation's well-regarded Alpha chip.
> 
> "Google's next step is to build high-performance silicon," said Mark 
> Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.
> 
> Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he 
> declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, 
> Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy 
> something that was just as good.
> 
> But he added that Google continued to believe that its approach to 
> designing its own cheap and fast computer networks gave it an edge.
> 
> "Having lots of relatively unreliable machines and turning them into a 
> reliable service is a hard problem," Mr. Hölzle said. "That is what we 
> have been doing for a while."
> 
> 
> Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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--
Jennifer Dozar
http://seul.org/~jennifer/osschools/
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