We have known for a while that Google has invested heavily in data centers. A recent NYT
article highlights Google's investment in hardware and operating systems. An interesting tidbit was that Google is now the fourth largest maker of computer servers. They are investing in chip design, and have patents in drive-cooling technology. On the OS front, they have implemented a program -- MapReduce -- that can allow a novice user to exploit parallel processing technology for their problem solving. The same article estimates that upto 30% of coding time is spent on figuring out how to turn the code that can be used by the parallel processors. A second innovation on the OS arena is the Google File System that is used to keep data on the distributed server farms. This is helpful when servers fail and the system should automatically reconfigure itself without losing any information or reliability. A third innovation is Google Work Queue. This is also refereed to as virtualization technology that allows task to be assigned to servers and make it seem as if each task has a dedicated server. The same program provides load balancing services on a global scale.