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Google’s vice-president of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential recruits about just what lies behind that search page. ZDNet UK snuck in to listen.
The numbers alone are enough to make your eyes water.
- Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
- Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
- Over 30 clusters
- 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
- One petabyte of data in a cluster — so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue
- Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
- No complete system failure since February 2000
It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet, arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully managed system (we’re not counting distributed computing projects here), some 200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer scientists.
And it is all hidden behind a deceptively simple, white, Web page that contains a single one-line text box and a button that says Google Search.
When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does; so long as we have a connection to the Internet, the Google search page is there day and night, every day of the year, and it is not just there, but it returns results. Google recognises that the returns are not always perfect, and there are still issues there — more on those later — but when you understand the complexity of the system behind that Web page you may be able to forgive the imperfections. You may even agree that what Google achieves is nothing short of sorcery.
On Thursday evening, Google’s vice-president of engineering, Urs Hölzle, who has been with the company since 1999 and who is now a Google fellow, gave an insight to would-be Google employees into just what it takes to run an operation on such a scale, with such reliability. ZDNet UK snuck in the back to glean some of the secrets of Google’s magic.
Google’s vision is broader than most people imagine, said Hölzle: “Most people say Google is a search engine but our mission is to organise information to make it accessible.”
Behind that, he said, comes a vast scale of computing power based on cheap, no-name hardware that is prone to failure. There are hardware malfunctions not just once, but time and time again, many times a day.
Yes, that’s right, Google is built on imperfect hardware. The magic is writing software that accepts that hardware will fail, and expeditiously deals with that reality, says Hölzle.
Tags: googlemania
