Trivia: Google's electric bill

[Arnab]

Google maintains an estimated 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world...

Other than wages, one of the biggest costs that Google faces is electric power consumption...

Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which could cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges.

Neat.

[Kabir]

I thought some of their servers around the world are on trucks so that it can maintain mobility? Do you know anything about it?

[reverse_swing]

From Wiki:

Google is currently developing a supercomputer at a data center located in the town of The Dalles, Oregon, on the Columbia River, approximately 80 miles from Portland. The project, codenamed Project 02,^[5] is expected to substantially add to their current global network capable of processing billions of search queries per day and a growing repertoire of other services.^[5] The new complex is approximately the size of two football fields with cooling towers four stories high. The project has already created hundreds of jobs in the area, mainly construction jobs at this point, with an expected 60 to 200 permanent positions later this year.^[5] Real estate prices in the small town of 12,000 have also increased by 40%.^[5]

[Rabz]

For a company like Google, 2 Million Dollar is just a mere pocket change...
or may be even less than that....

[Spitfire_x86]

Do their servers consume only 45W on average? That's quite surprising.

[Arnab]

One of the reasons offered behind this is that they deliberatey use a lot of old generation processors like P2 instead of the latter generation power-hungry P3, P4 etc.

Plus the load balancing algorithm must play a big part in this too.

The hardware load balancing algorithms are probably almost as important to Google's success as the search algorithms.

[Duck]

In one blog, I have read that google is planning for clean, cheap nuclear energy (!?!) to cope up with their electric power consumption which is their biggest expenditure, not even the hardware or personnels!

[RazabQ]

Ok, I'll ask the better half to confirm on this mobile server farm thing - which frankly sounds apocryphal; the better half works at Google these days ...

[Arnab]

Is everyone in CA a Google employee these days? They should just buy the freakin state from Ahnold.

[RazabQ]

Originally Posted by Arnab
Is everyone in CA a Google employee these days? They should just buy the freakin state from Ahnold.

Heh ... nah, but you should see the typical tech-background Bangali reaction to a google job. You'd think it was the toughest job to get in the world! BTW, no there is no mobile server farm.

[AsifTheManRahman]

Originally Posted by RazabQ
Heh ... nah, but you should see the typical tech-background Bangali reaction to a google job. You'd think it was the toughest job to get in the world! BTW, no there is no mobile server farm.

maybe not, but having gone through their interview process, as well as some other tech-biggies, i'd think they're a tad tougher than the rest of the bunch. then again, i'm just a stupid intern.

[RazabQ]

try i-banking or a top tier consulting interview - killer!!! For that matter take a gander at Clorox's interview process - big killer.

Google's interview difficulty is on par with what MS used to do it its heydays before sheer size caused a necessary dilution

[AsifTheManRahman]

nice..i was wondering why MS interviews got easier compared to say, even last year; but then again, MS's heydays surely go back to more than a year?