Data Cube Systems

Google never says how many servers are running in its data centers. But a recent presentation by a Google engineer shows that the company is preparing to manage as many as 10 million servers in the future.

Google’s Jeff Dean was one of the keynote speakers at an ACM workshop on large-scale computing systems, and discussed some of the technical details of the company’s mighty infrastructure, which is spread across dozens of data centers around the world.

In his presentation Dean also discussed a new storage and computation system called Spanner, which will seek to automate management of Google services across multiple data centers. That includes automated allocation of resources across “entire fleets of machines.”

Dean says Spanner will be designed for a future scale of “10⁶ to 10⁷ machines,” meaning 1 million to 10 million machines. The goal will be “automatic, dynamic world-wide placement of data & computation to minimize latency or cost.”

Over the long-term, that type of cost management strategy could address regional differences in bandwidth costs and power costs. As we’ve previously noted, the ability to seamlessly shift workloads between data centers creates energy management possibilities, including a “follow the moon” strategy which takes advantage of lower costs for power and cooling during overnight hours. In this scenario, virtualized workloads are shifted across data centers in different time zones to capture savings from off-peak utility rates.

Another motivation for automated capacity management is to route around failures or data center downtime. Google has acknowledged developing software with this goal in mind, and several recent Gmail service outages have reinforced the value of rapid load-shifting across data centers.

This kind of automation could also allow Google to plan more energy-efficient facilities like its chiller-less data center in Belgium. if the weather gets too warm to operate servers safely, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers

With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn’t be too long before the machines become infinitely fast — except they can’t.

A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we’ll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip. His prediction became known as Moore’s Law, and it has held true throughout the evolution of computers — the fastest processor today beats out a ten-year-old competitor by a factor of about 30.

If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get.

 
“If we believe in Moore’s laW … then it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit,” Levitin said.

“No system can overcome that limit. It doesn’t depend on the physical nature of the system or how it’s implemented, what algorithm you use for computation … any choice of hardware and software,” Levitin said. “This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light.”

Scott Aaronson, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, thought Levitin’s estimate of 75 years extremely optimistic.

Moore’s Law, he said, probably won’t hold for more than 20 years.

In the early 1980s, Levitin singled out a quantum elementary operation, the most basic task a quantum computer could carry out. In a paper published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for this elementary operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit for all possible computers.

Using their equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer spits out ten quadrillion more operations each second than today’s fastest processors. 

“It’s very important to try to establish a fundamental limit — how far we can go using these resources,” Levitin explained.

 
The physicists pointed out that technological barriers might slow down Moore’s law as we approach this limit. Quantum computers, unlike electrical ones, can’t handle “noise” — a kink in a wire or a change in temperature can cause havoc. Overcoming this weakness to make quantum computing a reality will take time and more research.

As computer components are packed tighter and tighter together, companies are finding that the newer processors are getting hotter sooner than they are getting faster. Hence the recent trend in duo and quad-core processing; rather than build faster processors, manufacturers place them in tandem to keep the heat levels tolerable while computing speeds shoot up. Scientists who need to churn through vast numbers of calculations might one day turn to superconducting computers cooled to drastically frigid temperatures. But even with these clever tactics, Levitin and Toffoli said, there’s no getting past the fundamental speed limit.

Aaronson called it beautiful that such a limit exists.

“From a theorist’s perspective, it’s good to know that fundamental limits are there, sort of an absolute ceiling,” he said. “You may say it’s disappointing that we can’t build infinitely fast computers, but as a picture of the world, if you have a theory of physics allows for infinitely fast computation, there could be a problem with that theory.”

Australian power supplier Integral Energy, a company “trusted” by 800,000 families and businesses according to their web site, has recently had to repair all of the company’s 1000 desktop computers and replace machines in the control room to contain a Win32 virus. If the Sydney Morning Herald is correct and Integral have been using anti-virus software that hasn’t been updated since before February, this is a huge cause for concern.

According to The Inquirer:

A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room.

Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development.

 

Apparently security experts also found there was “ineffective segregation” or “more typically none at all” between the the company’s main network and the power grid computers.

Thankfully the power grid control servers run Solaris (at least they got something right), you would still hope that any computers in a network connected to power grid computers would at least have anti-virus software up-to-date. I must ask: why on earth were the computers used by the operators running Windows, and connected to the main network with out-of-date security software? My own computer would be more suitable for running a power grid.

I watched a documentary once that claimed critical infrastructure systems in many countries were insecure, and I thought they were exaggerating. But if a virus that was known since February can bring down 1000 computers of a power supplier, including the control room, I’m not so sure…

Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant’s Research department.

The discovery came to light after Microsoft Research employee, Robert Morgan, carelessly left details of his work on the social-networking site, LinkedIn.

The senior researcher’s profile said he was: “Working in high security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and longterm projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP and IBM.”

Morgan’s LinkedIn profile has now been pulled down, but a version remains in the Google search cache.

A move to 128-bit support would be a bold move for Microsoft. Many, including PC Pro’s own Jon Honeyball, were urging Microsoft to make Windows 7 64-bit only, but the company continues to offer a 32-bit version of the forthcoming OS.

Microsoft has said very little publicly about Windows 8, although on a visit to the UK earlier this week, CEO Steve Ballmer denied rumours that Windows 7 would be the last major client OS the company produced. Ballmer admitted that planning was underway on Windows 8, although it’s highly unlikely that the OS will arrive until 2012 at the earliest.

Morgan’s talk of planning for Windows 9 supports Ballmer’s claim that the company thinks there is plenty of life left in Windows yet.