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Reading 2 Facebook Joins Google in HPC Computing Architectures For Big Data Apr 2011

Facebook has revealed how it designs custom servers and builds data centers to handle large amounts of data, similar to Google's approach. Both companies distribute data across thousands of servers worldwide to allow for data access anywhere. Facebook's new design takes advantage of power-efficient processors and extra cooling to reduce power consumption in data centers. The design includes misting systems and allowing cool air to naturally drop over servers.

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Billy Eden William Asrul
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44 views2 pages

Reading 2 Facebook Joins Google in HPC Computing Architectures For Big Data Apr 2011

Facebook has revealed how it designs custom servers and builds data centers to handle large amounts of data, similar to Google's approach. Both companies distribute data across thousands of servers worldwide to allow for data access anywhere. Facebook's new design takes advantage of power-efficient processors and extra cooling to reduce power consumption in data centers. The design includes misting systems and allowing cool air to naturally drop over servers.

Uploaded by

Billy Eden William Asrul
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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11/22/2016 Facebook joins Google in HPC Computing Architectures for Big Data

Facebook joins
Google in HPC
Computing
Architectures for Big
Data
Facebook recently revealed how it uses custom designed servers by rackspace to build their data centers. Google was the
first search company to develop an architecture and it.s own software systems for handling the huge amount of data
generated by indexing the web. Their approach has become a standard in the Big Data world where data has to be always
available anywhere in the world. Most data is write once and read in many places, and doesn't really fit into the standard
relational data base methodologies. 

Instead, data is distributed and replicated across many thousands of servers which are in clusters around the world. Google
pioneered this approach when they had to find a way to implement their page rank algorithm. The Google file system and
their map reduce processing approach fits nicely into this environment. More recently, Yahoo has supported an open source
version of the Google approach. This system is called Hadoop, and has recently been handed off to Apache as a top level
Apache project. It is now the standard at many, many search and social media companies and, such as Yahoo, Facebook,
Media 6,Digg, ... There are a variety of toolsets built on top of Hadoop, just as Google has a wide variety of systems built on
top of it's proprietary system.

One of the challenges of Big Data world of processing processing is the power consumption of those thousands of servers
in each data center. The Facebook team has now unveiled it's hardware and networking architecture which takes advantage
of newer processors which have sophisticated power capabilities, such that they can dynamically use less power when they
are not heavily loaded. Custom designed 1.5U (instead of 1U) servers have extra large fans that cool more efficiently. They
also have larger heat sinks.

The whole data center has been designed for low power consumption, including cooling and power backup systems. The
new data center design uses misting systems at the top level to cool air (if necessary) and lets the cool air drop down over
the server instead of being forced up by fans.
Cool idea!!

Here is a graphic of their data center design.

http://researchcomputing.blogspot.ca/2011/04/facebook-joins-google-in-hpc-computing.html?view=sidebar 1/2
11/22/2016 Facebook joins Google in HPC Computing Architectures for Big Data

This becomes another example of where the problems of the "new media" sites are forcing out of the box thinking that are
quite relevant to general and HPC computing. 

I look forward to more innovations like this from new media companies, that will eventually change how major corporations
do their processing.
Posted 18th April 2011 by Norman White
Labels: Apache big data coolingfacebook fermi hpc GoogleHADOOP misting power usagerackspace solar power
notebooks

http://researchcomputing.blogspot.ca/2011/04/facebook-joins-google-in-hpc-computing.html?view=sidebar 2/2

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