[FoRK] Google and the Wisdom of Clouds

[Luis Villa]

I can't believe I now count as old-school, but if no one else will do
it... WHERE ARE THE BITS ;)

"Commandment 7: Thou shalt comment on any bits and/or clue you
forward. Don't just send us raw bits, because we are all well read.
Send a paragraph or two about the bits. To quote the brilliant Dan
Connolly,

    The paragraph or two of personal analysis is the essential part.
Without that, a "hey, read this!" message is nothing more than a
commercial. In this age of information overload, let's do each other
the favor of information _reduction_.

So give us commentary, or stay quiet."

Luis (feeling cranky this afternoon)

On Dec 15, 2007 4:02 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
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