Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry? – Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

John Markoff and Saul Hansell of The New York Times have the story on Google’s secret project in Oregon.

The Dalles, Oregon on the banks of the windswept Columbia River, is home to Google’s secret weapon to dominate the next generation of Internet computing — The Googleplex.

But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the sky.

The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of what may soon be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, helping to supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services.

And odd as it may seem, the barren desert land surrounding the Columbia along the Oregon-Washington border – at the intersection of low-cost electricity and readily accessible data networking – is the backdrop for a multibillion-dollar face-off among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo that will determine dominance in the online world in the years ahead.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are building giant data centers upstream in Washington State, 130 miles to the north. But Google is doing something radically different here. The very need for two cooling towers, each connected to a football field-sized data center, is evidence of its extraordinary ambition.

As imposing as Google’s new Oregon data center is, when it opens it will only a piece of a worldwide computing system known as the Googleplex, which is tied together by strands of fiber optic cables. A similar computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta.

“Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it’s a hidden asset,” said Danny Hillis (above left), a supercomputing pioneer and the cofounder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles, or 130 kilometers, east of Portland, Oregon, has been a closely guarded corporate secret. Many local officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the Google data center project, referred to locally as Project 02, because they signed confidentiality agreements with the company last year.

The project has created hundreds of construction jobs, caused local real estate prices to jump 40 percent and is expected to create 60 to 200 permanent jobs in a town of 12,000 people when the center opens later this year.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a vast variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce. Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion.

Today even the closest Google watchers have lost precise count of how big the system is. The best guess is that Google now has more than 450,000 servers spread in at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and is building significant facilities in China and Russia. Connecting these centers is a high- capacity data network that the company has assembled over the past few years.

Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. So the speed of light ends up being a constraint, and the company wants to put significant processing power close to all of its users.

Microsoft’s Internet computing effort is currently based on 200,000 servers and the company expects that number to grow to 800,000 by 2011 under its most aggressive forecast, according to a company document.

“Google is like the Borg,” said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990s online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on Star Trek that was assembled from millions of individual components. “I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google.”

I’ve heard rumors, too — but dismissed them as fantasies.

I was told by one individual (who said it was hush-hush), that a vast underground video server warehouse is planned underneath Portland’s O’ Bryant Square, a hangout for the Food Not Bombs crowd – and right across the street from the Pittock Internet Exchange.

It would be the world’s largest video server.

Time Warner Telecom bought the fiber assets of Enron in the Portland area. It extends the Time Warner Telecom’s local fiber network to 158 route miles around Portland.

The Times Online, The Seattle PI, Australia’s Googleplex, Gorge Business, The Dalles Cronicle and the Port of The Dalles (webcam) have more.

Related DailyWireless stories include; Free MAN in Hood River, Oregon MuniFiber: the Bad & the Good, GoogleNet?, GoogleNet Moonshot, Transoceanic Fiber Map, Supercomputer 05, iGrid 2005, DailyWireless Testifies for Muni Broadband and Oregon Fiber for Google.

The term “Googleplex” was originally coined by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managemers: it blasted them in to space.

Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat. The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.

That planet turned out to be Earth, where the arrival of the Golgafrincham B Ark rather disrupted an experiment designed to find the question to the ultimate Answer.

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Posted by Sam Churchill on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 6:43 pm.