I thought this was a joke when I received the link via email, but here it is in print, in the International Herald Tribune:
On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is as big as two football fields, with twin cooling towers protruding four stories into the sky.
The towers, looming like an information-age nuclear plant, mark the site of what may soon be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, helping to supply the ever-greater horsepower needed to process billions of search queries a day and a growing repertory of other Internet services...
As imposing as Google's new Oregon data center is, when it opens it will only a piece of a worldwide computing system known as the Googleplex, which is tied together by strands of fiber optic cables. A similar computing center has recently been completed in Atlanta...
...Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are spending vast sums of capital to build out their computing capabilities to run both search engines and a vast variety of Web services that encompass e-mail, video and music downloads and online commerce. Microsoft stunned analysts last quarter when it announced that it would spend an unanticipated $2 billion next year, much of it in an effort to catch up with Google. Google said its own capital expenditures would run to at least $1.5 billion.
Google is known to the world as a search engine, but in many ways it is foremost an effort to build a network of supercomputers, using the latest academic research, that can process more data, faster and cheaper than its rivals.
The Googleplex? A a network of supercomputers? Huh? Are you seeing why I thought this was a joke?
The article goes on to estimate that Google houses something like 450,000 servers -- compared to Microsoft's 200,000. Which means that Microsoft has plenty of catching up to do, after all.
Read the whole article, which includes an coverage of an upgrade on Google Earth.
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