[FoRK] Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm

COVER STORY December 13, 2007, 5:00PM EST

Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

A lofty new strategy aims to put incredible computing power in the hands of
many

by Stephen Baker

One simple question. That's all it took for Christophe Bisciglia to bewilder
confident job applicants at Google (GOOG). Bisciglia, an angular 27-year-old
senior software engineer with long wavy hair, wanted to see if these
undergrads were ready to think like Googlers. "Tell me," he'd say, "what
would you do if you had 1,000 times more data?"

What a strange idea. If they returned to their school projects and were
foolish enough to cram formulas with a thousand times more details about
shopping or maps or—heaven forbid—with video files, they'd slow their college
servers to a crawl.

At that point in the interview, Bisciglia would explain his question. To
thrive at Google, he told them, they would have to learn to work—and to
dream—on a vastly larger scale. He described Google's globe-spanning network
of computers. Yes, they answered search queries instantly. But together they
also blitzed through mountains of data, looking for answers or intelligence
faster than any machine on earth. Most of this hardware wasn't on the Google
campus. It was just out there, somewhere on earth, whirring away in big
refrigerated data centers. Folks at Google called it "the cloud." And one
challenge of programming at Google was to leverage that cloud—to push it to
do things that would overwhelm lesser machines. New hires at Google,
Bisciglia says, usually take a few months to get used to this scale. "Then
one day, you see someone suggest a wild job that needs a few thousand
machines, and you say: Hey, he gets it.'"

What recruits needed, Bisciglia eventually decided, was advance training. So
one autumn day a year ago, when he ran into Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt
between meetings, he floated an idea. He would use his 20% time, the
allotment Googlers have for independent projects, to launch a course. It
would introduce students at his alma mater, the University of Washington, to
programming at the scale of a cloud. Call it Google 101. Schmidt liked the
plan. Over the following months, Bisciglia's Google 101 would evolve and
grow. It would eventually lead to an ambitious partnership with IBM (IBM),
announced in October, to plug universities around the world into Google-like
computing clouds.

As this concept spreads, it promises to expand Google's footprint in industry
far beyond search, media, and advertising, leading the giant into scientific
research and perhaps into new businesses. In the process Google could become,
in a sense, the world's primary computer.

"I had originally thought [Bisciglia] was going to work on education, which
was fine," Schmidt says late one recent afternoon at Google headquarters.
"Nine months later, he comes out with this new [cloud] strategy, which was
completely unexpected." The idea, as it developed, was to deliver to
students, researchers, and entrepreneurs the immense power of Google-style
computing, either via Google's machines or others offering the same service.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by
some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the
PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including
numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping
ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike
many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its
individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them
out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates
as it grows, almost like a living thing.

A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle
information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the
evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down
their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial
utilities. Google executives had long envisioned and prepared for this
change. Cloud computing, with Google's machinery at the very center, fit
neatly into the company's grand vision, established a decade ago by founders
Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible." Bisciglia's idea opened a pathway toward this
future. "Maybe he had it in his brain and didn't tell me," Schmidt says. "I
didn't realize he was going to try to change the way computer scientists
thought about computing. That's a much more ambitious goal."

ONE-WAY STREET

For small companies and entrepreneurs, clouds mean opportunity—a leveling of
the playing field in the most data-intensive forms of computing. To date,
only a select group of cloud-wielding Internet giants has had the resources
to scoop up huge masses of information and build businesses upon it. Our
words, pictures, clicks, and searches are the raw material for this industry.
But it has been largely a one-way street. Humanity emits the data, and a
handful of companies—the likes of Google, Yahoo! (YHOO), or Amazon.com
(AMZN)—transform the info into insights, services, and, ultimately, revenue.

This status quo is already starting to change. In the past year, Amazon has
opened up its own networks of computers to paying customers, initiating new
players, large and small, to cloud computing. Some users simply park their
massive databases with Amazon. Others use Amazon's computers to mine data or
create Web services. In November, Yahoo opened up a cluster of computers—a
small cloud—for researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. And Microsoft
(MSFT) has deepened its ties to communities of scientific researchers by
providing them access to its own server farms. As these clouds grow, says
Frank Gens, senior analyst at market research firm IDC, "A whole new
community of Web startups will have access to these machines. It's like
they're planting Google seeds." Many such startups will emerge in science and
medicine, as data-crunching laboratories searching for new materials and
drugs set up shop in the clouds.

For clouds to reach their potential, they should be nearly as easy to program
and navigate as the Web. This, say analysts, should open up growing markets
for cloud search and software tools—a natural business for Google and its
competitors. Schmidt won't say how much of its own capacity Google will offer
to outsiders, or under what conditions or at what prices. "Typically, we like
to start with free," he says, adding that power users "should probably bear
some of the costs." And how big will these clouds grow? "There's no limit,"
Schmidt says. As this strategy unfolds, more people are starting to see that
Google is poised to become a dominant force in the next stage of computing.
"Google aspires to be a large portion of the cloud, or a cloud that you would
interact with every day," the CEO says. The business plan? For now, Google
remains rooted in its core business, which gushes with advertising revenue.
The cloud initiative is barely a blip in terms of investment. It hovers in
the distance, large and hazy and still hard to piece together, but bristling
with possibilities.

Changing the nature of computing and scientific research wasn't at the top of
Bisciglia's agenda the day he collared Schmidt. What he really wanted, he
says, was to go back to school. Unlike many of his colleagues at Google, a
place teeming with PhDs, Bisciglia was snatched up by the company as soon as
he graduated from the University of Washington, or U-Dub, as nearly everyone
calls it. He'd never been a grad student. He ached for a break from his daily
routines at Google—the 10-hour workdays building search algorithms in his
cube in Building 44, the long commutes on Google buses from the apartment he
shared with three roomies in San Francisco's Duboce Triangle. He wanted to
return to Seattle, if only for one day a week, and work with his professor
and mentor, Ed Lazowska. "I had an itch to teach," he says.

He didn't think twice before vaulting over the org chart and batting around
his idea directly with the CEO. Bisciglia and Schmidt had known each other
for years. Shortly after landing at Google five years ago as a 22-year-old
programmer, Bisciglia worked in a cube across from the CEO's office. He'd
wander in, he says, drawn in part by the model airplanes that reminded him of
his mother's work as a United Airlines (UAUA) hostess. Naturally he talked
with the soft-spoken, professorial CEO about computing. It was almost like
college. And even after Bisciglia moved to other buildings, the two stayed in
touch. ("He's never too hard to track down, and he's incredible about
returning e-mails," Bisciglia says.)

On the day they first discussed Google 101, Schmidt offered one nugget of
advice: Narrow down the project to something Bisciglia could have up and
running in two months. "I actually didn't care what he did," Schmidt recalls.
But he wanted the young engineer to get feedback in a hurry. Even if
Bisciglia failed, he says, "he's smart, and he'd learn from it."

To launch Google 101, Bisciglia had to replicate the dynamics and a bit of
the magic of Google's cloud—but without tapping into the cloud itself or
revealing its deepest secrets. These secrets fuel endless speculation among
computer scientists. But Google keeps much under cover. This immense
computer, after all, runs the company. It automatically handles search,
places ads, churns through e-mails. The computer does the work, and thousands
of Google engineers, including Bisciglia, merely service the machine. They
teach the system new tricks or find new markets for it to invade. And they
add on new clusters—four new data centers this year alone, at an average cost
of $600 million apiece.

In building this machine, Google, so famous for search, is poised to take on
a new role in the computer industry. Not so many years ago scientists and
researchers looked to national laboratories for the cutting-edge research on
computing. Now, says Daniel Frye, vice-president of open systems development
at IBM, "Google is doing the work that 10 years ago would have gone on in a
national lab."

How was Bisciglia going to give students access to this machine? The easiest
option would have been to plug his class directly into the Google computer.
But the company wasn't about to let students loose in a machine loaded with
proprietary software, brimming with personal data, and running a $10.6
billion business. So Bisciglia shopped for an affordable cluster of 40
computers. He placed the order, then set about figuring out how to pay for
the servers. While the vendor was wiring the computers together, Bisciglia
alerted a couple of Google managers that a bill was coming. Then he "kind of
sent the expense report up the chain, and no one said no." He adds one of his
favorite sayings: "It's far easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for
permission." ("If you're interested in someone who strictly follows the
rules, Christophe's not your guy," says Lazowska, who refers to the cluster
as "a gift from heaven.")

A FRENETIC LEARNER

On Nov. 10, 2006, the rack of computers appeared at U-Dub's Computer Science
building. Bisciglia and a couple of tech administrators had to figure out how
to hoist the 1-ton rack up four stories into the server room. They eventually
made it, and then prepared for the start of classes, in January.

Bisciglia's mother, Brenda, says her son seemed marked for an unusual path
from the start. He didn't speak until age 2, and then started with sentences.
One of his first came as they were driving near their home in Gig Harbor,
Wash. A bug flew in the open window, and a voice came from the car seat in
back: "Mommy, there's something artificial in my mouth."

At school, the boy's endless questions and frenetic learning pace exasperated
teachers. His parents, seeing him sad and frustrated, pulled him out and
home-schooled him for three years. Bisciglia says he missed the company of
kids during that time but developed as an entrepreneur. He had a passion for
Icelandic horses and as an adolescent went into business raising them. Once,
says his father, Jim, they drove far north into Manitoba and bought horses,
without much idea about how to transport the animals back home. "The whole
trip was like a scene from one of Chevy Chase's movies," he says. Christophe
learned about computers developing Web pages for his horse sales and his
father's luxury-cruise business. And after concluding that computers promised
a brighter future than animal husbandry, he went off to U-Dub and signed up
for as many math, physics, and computer courses as he could.

In late 2006, as he shuttled between the Googleplex and Seattle preparing for
Google 101, Bisciglia used his entrepreneurial skills to piece together a
sprawling team of volunteers. He worked with college interns to develop the
curriculum, and he dragooned a couple of Google colleagues from the nearby
Kirkland (Wash.) facility to use some of their 20% time to help him teach it.
Following Schmidt's advice, Bisciglia worked to focus Google 101 on something
students could learn quickly. "I was like, what's the one thing I could teach
them in two months that would be useful and really important?" he recalls.
His answer was "MapReduce."

Bisciglia adores MapReduce, the software at the heart of Google computing.
While the company's famous search algorithms provide the intelligence for
each search, MapReduce delivers the speed and industrial heft. It divides
each task into hundreds, or even thousands, of tasks, and distributes them to
legions of computers. In a fraction of a second, as each one comes back with
its nugget of information, MapReduce quickly assembles the responses into an
answer. Other programs do the same job. But MapReduce is faster and appears
able to handle near limitless work. When the subject comes up, Bisciglia
rhapsodizes. "I remember graduating, coming to Google, learning about
MapReduce, and really just changing the way I thought about computer science
and everything," he says. He calls it "a very simple, elegant model." It was
developed by another Washington alumnus, Jeffrey Dean. By returning to U-Dub
and teaching MapReduce, Bisciglia would be returning this software "and this
way of thinking" back to its roots.

There was only one obstacle. MapReduce was anchored securely inside Google's
machine—and it was not for outside consumption, even if the subject was
Google 101. The company did share some information about it, though, to feed
an open-source version of MapReduce called Hadoop. The idea was that, without
divulging its crown jewel, Google could push for its standard to become the
architecture of cloud computing.

The team that developed Hadoop belonged to a company, Nutch, that got
acquired. Oddly, they were now working within the walls of Yahoo, which was
counting on the MapReduce offspring to give its own computers a touch of
Google magic. Hadoop remained open source, though, which meant the Google
team could adapt it and install it for free on the U-Dub cluster.

Students rushed to sign up for Google 101 as soon as it appeared in the
winter-semester syllabus. In the beginning, Bisciglia and his Google
colleagues tried teaching. But in time they handed over the job to
professional educators at U-Dub. "Their delivery is a lot clearer," Bisciglia
says. Within weeks the students were learning how to configure their work for
Google machines and designing ambitious Web-scale projects, from cataloguing
the edits on Wikipedia to crawling the Internet to identify spam. Through the
spring of 2007, as word about the course spread to other universities,
departments elsewhere started asking for Google 101.

Many were dying for cloud knowhow and computing power—especially for
scientific research. In practically every field, scientists were grappling
with vast piles of new data issuing from a host of sensors, analytic
equipment, and ever-finer measuring tools. Patterns in these troves could
point to new medicines and therapies, new forms of clean energy. They could
help predict earthquakes. But most scientists lacked the machinery to store
and sift through these digital El Dorados. "We're drowning in data," said
Jeannette Wing, assistant director of the National Science Foundation.

BIG BLUE LARGESSE

The hunger for Google computing put Bisciglia in a predicament. He had been
fortunate to push through the order for the first cluster of computers. Could
he do that again and again, eventually installing mini-Google clusters in
each computer science department? Surely not. To extend Google 101 to
universities around the world, the participants needed to plug into a shared
resource. Bisciglia needed a bigger cloud.

That's when luck descended on the Googleplex in the person of IBM Chairman
Samuel J. Palmisano. This was "Sam's day at Google," says an IBM researcher.
The winter day was a bit chilly for beach volleyball in the center of campus,
but Palmisano lunched on some of the fabled free cuisine in a cafeteria. Then
he and his team sat down with Schmidt and a handful of Googlers, including
Bisciglia. They drew on whiteboards and discussed cloud computing. It was no
secret that IBM wanted to deploy clouds to provide data and services to
business customers. At the same time, under Palmisano, IBM had been a leading
promoter of open-source software, including Linux. This was a key in Big
Blue's software battles, especially against Microsoft. If Google and IBM
teamed up on a cloud venture, they could construct the future of this type of
computing on Google-based standards, including Hadoop.

Google, of course, had a running start on such a project: Bisciglia's Google
101. In the course of that one day, Bisciglia's small venture morphed into a
major initiative backed at the CEO level by two tech titans. By the time
Palmisano departed that afternoon, it was established that Bisciglia and his
IBM counterpart, Dennis Quan, would build a prototype of a joint Google-IBM
university cloud.

Over the next three months they worked together at Google headquarters. (It
was around this time, Bisciglia says, that the cloud project evolved from 20%
into his full-time job.) The work involved integrating IBM's business
applications and Google servers, and equipping them with a host of
open-source programs, including Hadoop. In February they unveiled the
prototype for top brass in Mountain View, Calif., and for others on video
from IBM headquarters in Armonk, N.Y. Quan wowed them by downloading data
from the cloud to his cell phone. (It wasn't relevant to the core project,
Bisciglia says, but a nice piece of theater.)

The Google 101 cloud got the green light. The plan was to spread cloud
computing first to a handful of U.S. universities within a year and later to
deploy it globally. The universities would develop the clouds, creating tools
and applications while producing legions of computer scientists to continue
building and managing them.

Those developers should be able to find jobs at a host of Web companies,
including Google. Schmidt likes to compare the data centers to the
prohibitively expensive particle accelerators known as cyclotrons. "There are
only a few cyclotrons in physics," he says. "And every one if them is
important, because if you're a top-flight physicist you need to be at the lab
where that cyclotron is being run. That's where history's going to be made;
that's where the inventions are going to come. So my idea is that if you
think of these as supercomputers that happen to be assembled from smaller
computers, we have the most attractive supercomputers, from a science
perspective, for people to come work on."

As the sea of business and scientific data rises, computing power turns into
a strategic resource, a form of capital. "In a sense," says Yahoo Research
Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, "there are only five computers on earth." He lists
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn
electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency.

All sorts of business models are sure to evolve. Google and its rivals could
team up with customers, perhaps exchanging computing power for access to
their data. They could recruit partners into their clouds for pet projects,
such as the company's clean energy initiative, announced in November. With
the electric bills at jumbo data centers running upwards of $20 million a
year, according to industry analysts, it's only natural for Google to commit
both brains and server capacity to the search for game-changing energy
breakthroughs.

What will research clouds look like? Tony Hey, vice-president for external
research at Microsoft, says they'll function as huge virtual laboratories,
with a new generation of librarians—some of them human—"curating" troves of
data, opening them to researchers with the right credentials. Authorized
users, he says, will build new tools, haul in data, and share it with
far-flung colleagues. In these new labs, he predicts, "you may win the Nobel
prize by analyzing data assembled by someone else." Mark Dean, head of IBM's
research operation in Almaden, Calif., says that the mixture of business and
science will lead, in a few short years, to networks of clouds that will tax
our imagination. "Compared to this," he says, "the Web is tiny. We'll be
laughing at how small the Web is." And yet, if this "tiny" Web was big enough
to spawn Google and its empire, there's no telling what opportunities could
open up in the giant clouds.

It's a mid-November day at the Googleplex. A jetlagged Christophe Bisciglia
is just back from China, where he has been talking to universities about
Google 101. He's had a busy time, not only setting up the cloud with IBM but
also working out deals with six universities—U-Dub, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT,
Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Maryland—to launch it. Now he's got a
camera crew in a conference room, with wires and lights spilling over a
table. This is for a promotional video about cloud education that they'll
release, at some point, on YouTube (GOOG).

Eric Schmidt comes in. At 52, he is nearly twice Bisciglia's age, and his
body looks a bit padded next to his protégé's willowy frame. Bisciglia guides
him to a chair across from the camera and explains the plan. They'll tape the
audio from the interview and then set up Schmidt for some stand-alone face
shots. "B-footage," Bisciglia calls it. Schmidt nods and sits down. Then he
thinks better of it. He tells the cameramen to film the whole thing and skip
stand-alone shots. He and Bisciglia are far too busy to stand around for B
footage.

Baker is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York.