PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 – Google-Mart:

“The probable answer lies in one of Google’s underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn’t just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

Stumbled upon this via Slashdot. The dissection by the geeks there just makes this an even more interesting read:

• Ques: If most Google employees don’t know about the storage container, how does THIS guy know about it???

  Ans: He probably googled it.

• 5000 CPUs along with all those hard disks would generate a lot of heat:

  1W = the amount of power required to heat 1g of water 1 degree celsius in 1 second (1 J/sec).
  1 cup of coffee: 0.2 litres (200g) heated from 10 to 100 degrees celsius (90 degrees) = 18 KJ.
  250 KW: 14 cups of coffee per second.

  The answer to “where do we put these puppies”?
  Next to Starbucks.

• That’s it! The Opterons produce heat, which boils water which runs the turbines to generate electricity to power the Opterons! My god man! It’s the Google perpetual motion machine!

It all sounds possible and slightly sinister. Imagine it: one company with multiple supercomputers in disparate locations connected together by high-speed optical fibres. Hmm.

I for one, welcome our new Google overlords.