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by wz1000 2145 days ago
Doesn't the NSA have a bunch of massive datacenters?

Regardless of that, the datacenter can be appropriated by the government too.
1 comments
jeffbee 2145 days ago
No, the NSA has one facility that would be a small/medium datacenter in the big league, but only if you assume that the NSA is as efficient as Google, which is a bit of a stretch.

NSA Utah: 65 MW Google Pryor, Oklahoma: 340 MW

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a1369209993 2145 days ago
Megawatts are indicative of compute load, not storage load. I can definitely believe that Google is doing more compute than NSA, but that sounds more like a difference of need, not of ability.
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rossjudson 2145 days ago
What do you think the query pipeline looks like?

I can assure you that it's not mapping each query down to a single-sector disk read off an inverted index.

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a1369209993 2144 days ago
?

I think the query pipeline for NSA (relative to the scales of Google's query pipeline) looks like absense-of-query-pipeline. Hence NSA using less compute and thus (the reasoning goes) less power consumption.

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wz1000 2145 days ago
Presumably that Google data center does a lot of compute intensive, non search related stuff - like GCP for one.
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jeffbee 2145 days ago
Another thing that people persistently misunderstand is the scale relationship between GCP and the rest of Google.
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wz1000 2145 days ago
Even if all you say is true and it is truly impossible for the government to replicate any of what Google does, the point is moot. If the government is going to appropriate Google's index, might as well appropriate the datacenters too. Really, whats Google going to do with them once search is gone? According to you, it is the only thing they have have running there.
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jimbokun 2145 days ago
Might as well appropriate the engineers, too, and chain them to their desks and force them to keep everything working.
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wz1000 2144 days ago
Truly an absurd comment. The US government is the largest employer in the country, with something in the order of 10 million employees. Are they all slaves chained to their desks?
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rossjudson 2145 days ago
It also does a lot of storage intensive, non search related stuff, like Google Cloud Storage.

Every Google data center does...everything.

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