Second Life's Supercomputer...?
|
|
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Winking Loudmouth
Join date: 31 Jul 2004
Posts: 1,336
|
03-31-2006 17:47
Here is a very old article that you might find interesting. It explains how the Google massive super computer (made of cheap parts) works. http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.htmlThe author finishes with the question: From: someone This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system? ... why, Second Life, of course! 100,000 servers would be able to deal with 400,000 simultaneous users out of a total of 8 million registered users (using the current statistics by Chromal Brodsky). Hmm. With 1 million users scheduled for the end of 2007, and projecting that a bit, Linden Lab will need to buy Google around 2010 or so, just to be able to deal with all the users. What is wrong with this picture? |
|
Introvert Petunia
over 2 billion posts
Join date: 11 Sep 2004
Posts: 2,065
|
03-31-2006 18:56
From: someone What is wrong with this picture? Ummm.... that GOOG has a market capitalization of $115B and 2005 net income of $1.5B and LL has a liability of $30M and has never made a profit? Or is it that Google has 100 times the staff of LL? Or is it that Google works as intended most of the time? Cripes! I stink at these kinds of guessing games.  |
|
SuezanneC Baskerville
Forums Rock!
Join date: 22 Dec 2003
Posts: 14,229
|
03-31-2006 19:18
From: Introvert Petunia Ummm.... that GOOG has a market capitalization of $115B and 2005 net income of $1.5B and LL has a liability of $30M and has never made a profit? Or is it that Google has 100 times the staff of LL? Or is it that Google works as intended most of the time? Cripes! I stink at these kinds of guessing games. The difference between Google and SL that comes to my mind on reading this is that Google has lots of users because it is useful and works well and rapidly·
_____________________
-
So long to these forums, the vBulletin forums that used to be at forums.secondlife.com. I will miss them.
I can be found on the web by searching for "SuezanneC Baskerville", or go to
http://www.google.com/profiles/suezanne
-
http://lindenlab.tribe.net/ created on 11/19/03.
Members: Ben, Catherine, Colin, Cory, Dan, Doug, Jim, Philip, Phoenix, Richard,
Robin, and Ryan
-
|
|
Dyne Talamasca
Noneuclidean Love Polygon
Join date: 9 Oct 2005
Posts: 436
|
03-31-2006 21:10
I thought the difference was that Google started out as a relatively simple modification to known software technology that doesn't particularly stress the capacity of today's hardware and network capacity, except through volume of requests ... whereas LL is building a relatively new, extremely complex technology from the ground up in an arena that invariably pushes what computers and networks are capable of.
|
|
Introvert Petunia
over 2 billion posts
Join date: 11 Sep 2004
Posts: 2,065
|
03-31-2006 22:17
From: someone LL is building a relatively new, extremely complex technology from the ground up in an arena that invariably pushes what computers and networks are capable of. What about SL pushes what computers and networks are capable of? I understand where you may have come to that belief as I've oft heard it repeated myself yet it does not seem self-evidently true. I read the SL whitepapers when they were still available; there really wasn't anything novel other than the conjunction of extant technologies in there. I also read an article around 1998 in Scientific American by some reasearchers named Brin & Page at Stanford about a dirt simple idea, stolen from the "Science Citation Index" familiar to most academics that says that an article's significance or merit could be inferred from the number of articles which cite it. This trivial, nearly plagerized idea became known as Google. The difference doesn't lie in the complexity, it lies in the elegance of execution. |
|
Zepp Zaftig
Unregistered Abuser
Join date: 20 Mar 2005
Posts: 470
|
04-01-2006 04:21
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn
What is wrong with this picture?
That there's no poll? |
|
Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
|
04-01-2006 11:31
From: Gwyneth Llewelyn What is wrong with this picture? Google is doing something that is well understood, they're just doing a consistently better job of it then Yahoo, Lycos, Altavista, Jeeves, and all the other living and dead search engines. Google has no local content in their main service. If Google loses a server's worth of data, their spiders are likely to recover it from the web long before anyone notices. Second Life is pushing the limits of what's possible, and everything they have on their servers is critical to someone. |
