Building Large Systems at Google

I watched this video very late last night–way cool.  It’s a Google TechTalk about building very large systems.

A few things stand out to me:

• How a large cluster of commodity machines (1000+) can function as a single large fault-tolerant hard drive (GFS)
• How a large cluster of commodity machines can also function as a single large distributed computation grid

I’ve often read people talking about ultra-large scale systems where the big clusters function as a single large computer, but this video brought that point home.

It’s pretty cool to think they have abstracted a cluster as a hard drive, then abstracted on top of that to create a huge virtual machine for solving problems (executing algorithms).

Enjoy!