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What does it take to make Google work at scale?

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Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#101
post #57
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a chicago office, fwiw...

Chicago is midwest in geography and climate only. Someone who grew up in a typical small midwest town would feel as out of place in Chicago as in San Francisco, New York, or Paris.

Chicago is a large city, and with having a large city some of the small town-isms just don't fly.

However, I do enjoy living in Chicago, and that I do consider it a huge difference from the coasts.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#102
This may seem irrelevant, but as a GPU computing researcher, I'm still disappointed that GPU still hasn't made its way to be the first citizen at data centers. I know world of HPC looks much different, but I wonder when GPU can be vastly used in data centers, and will NVIDIA's Pascal architecture make a huge impact on this?

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#105
post #102

This may seem irrelevant, but as a GPU computing researcher, I'm still disappointed that GPU still hasn't made its way to be the first citizen at data centers. I know world of HPC looks much different, but I wonder when GPU can be vastly used in data centers, and will NVIDIA's Pascal architecture make a huge impact on this?

I don't think GPUs will be big with "web services" datacenters anytime soon.

As the slides mentioned, the difference between this web-services stuff and HPC is that HPC has a much higher compute/data ratio. Said another way, this web-services stuff is all about moving data, collating it a bit, and less about intensive mathematical processing of it.

Most of the boxes in the diagrams are datastores. Block stores, object stores, columnar stores, caches. I hate to say it but... big data. Not (as) big compute.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#106
post #96
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Master Cracking the Coding Interview? Have a positive attitude?

Right, spend all of your free time cramming on algo and data structure questions that you weren't using before and probably wont use at Google.

For 20 years of 6 figure salary at one of the most prestigious engineering jobs in the world? Maybe worth cramming a bit?

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the clocks are stationary with respect to each other (within some tolerance), it's impossible to guarantee completely synchronized clocks among the systems. This follows trivially from the impossibility of instantaneous communication due to the second postulate of special relativity.

If two clocks are stationary with respect to each other, then there is no ambiguity about where the midpoint between them is. Then you just do something like, when your clock hits noon, fire a projectile at a fixed speed toward the other clock. If the projectiles meet at the halfway point, then the clocks are synchronized. And there is no relativistic funny business involved, because the clocks are stationary with re…

"If the projectiles meet at the halfway point, then the clocks are synchronized."

And how would either end-point know this exactly?

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#109

Is it possible to view the video or the presentation given in which the speaker talks more in detail explaining the slideS?

Hi, author here.

The talk for which I put the slide deck together was given at a summer school and unfortunately not recorded, but if there is sufficient interest, I might tape a re-run and upload it. (Though unlikely to have time in the next month, so it might be a while.)

In the meantime, the original papers (listed in the bibliographies at http://malteschwarzkopf.de/research/assets/google-stack.pdf and http://malteschwarzkopf.de/research/assets/facebook-stack.pd...) have a lot more detail than my (very condensed) slides.

Re: What does it take to make Google work at scale?

#110
post #109

Is it possible to view the video or the presentation given in which the speaker talks more in detail explaining the slideS?

Hi, author here. The talk for which I put the slide deck together was given at a summer school and unfortunately not recorded, but if there is sufficient interest, I might tape a re-run and upload it. (Though unlikely to have time in the next month, so it might be a while.) In the meantime, the original papers (listed in the bibliographies at http://malteschwarzkopf.de/research/assets/google-stack.pdf and http://malt…

Great! thanks for the share
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