On 25/06/2015 10:27, Dale wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
>> On 24/06/2015 13:50, Alec Ten Harmsel wrote:
>>> P.P.S. Also, on 1% better performance: My professor for the compilers
>>> class I took used to (maybe still does) work at Google. Apparently
>>> Google sees a <1% increase in performance as *the best thing ever*,
>>> because it can save them a bunch of money in infrastructure and power.
>>> Apparently Google are the ultimate ricers.
>>
>> Sounds like a case where Google already did the sensible optimizations
>> long long ago and are now hitting the diminishing returns from the long
>> tail. There are probably many of these and they all add up.
>>
>> One thing I've learned about Google's setup - there's nothing else like
>> it out there and they are truly unique. Almost nothing Google does to
>> optimize their setup is widely applicable to anything else :-)
>>
>> Take their power density. Last figures I have is they were running at 4x
>> the kW per square foot as anyone else with a brain. This terrifies
>> people who know about cooling. But, that's the setup and that's what
>> Google has to work with. Now suddenly, all those lots of little
>> improvements start to become a huge deal.
>>
>> So yes, ultimate ricers. Also the ultimates in
>> "riding-co-close-to-the-edge-you-fall-off-the-cliff" :-)
>>
> 
> 
> Do we even have a clue how many puters Google has now?  I read several
> years ago it was like 10,000 or so.  No telling what they have now.  o_O

Around 2006, it was at least 100,000

You are out by an order of magnitude :-)

I would not be surprised if today Google had 5 million custom-built
stripped-down motherboards in production. Google long ago moved past the
idea of "having individual computers". By all accounts they have many
large systems, and those systems are made up of lots of small parts -
each part being a thing with CPU/RAM/disks and whatever.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckin...@gmail.com


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