Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks an Expansion of Power - New York Times: "Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. 'Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset,' said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.It's Voldemort, don't be afraid to say it.
The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. 'Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is,' acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.
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The fact that Google is behind the data center, referred to locally as Project 02, has been reported in the local press. But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year.
'No one says the 'G' word,' said Diane Sherwood, executive director of the Port of Klickitat, Wash., directly across the river from The Dalles, who is not bound by such agreements. 'It's a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.'
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 over at least 25 locations around the world. The company has major operations in Ireland, and a big computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta. Connecting these centers is a high-capacity fiber optic network that the company has assembled over the last few years.Science fiction references abounded and they missed the most obvious. Resistance is not futile, spread your internet searching around.
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'Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google.'"
Cracks me up, there was that old joke about Enterprise running into a Microsoft Borg, nobody saw a Googleplex in the viewscreen.
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