GOOGLE and NASA

John Battelle's Searchblog

Google does not want to waste any time on its computers. My guess is that Google owns at least 200,000 computers! This is based on the fact that at one time Google had 10 data centers and each center had about 10,000 computers. Since then it has been reported that Google is spreading out to 60 smaller data centers.

Google uses cheap, off the shelf computers, but its software is designed for "plug and play". Google can add another rack or a whole new data center and the existing computers find the new resources and put them to work.

The Google-NASA partnership makes sense. All these brains and computers working next to one another is pretty amazing. Ideas will flow.

I don't know the utilization rates at peak hours and off peak hours for Google's machines. However, even though Google helps searchers around the globe at all hours of the day and night, you can be assured that they do have peak and non peak hours. NASA studies can surely use this computing power.

Years ago, many data centers did banking, payroll and other "batch" processing at night. High powered users kept the computers busy druing the day. Somewhere, I read that Google can outrun high dollar servers by a factor of 30 at about 1/8th the costs. Why not let our space program in on some of this power and savings?
Other views:
Matt Asay
Global Chinese
Silicon Beat
Google Blog