A few recent news items made me realize that I haven't written anything positive about Google for a while. So allow me to point out a couple of things...
Google Teaching Hadoop
First off, in a press release titled Google and IBM Announce University Initiative to Address Internet-Scale Computing Challenges, I read the following:
The goal of this initiative is to improve computer science students' knowledge of highly parallel computing practices to better address the emerging paradigm of large-scale distributed computing. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. With their combined resources, the companies hope to lower the financial and logistical barriers for the academic community to explore this emerging model of computing.
Fantastic! The world needs more people who know how to design, build, and deploy large grid computing systems.
For this project, the two companies have dedicated a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google machines and IBM BladeCenter and System x servers) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster via the Internet to test their parallel programming course projects. The servers will run open source software including the Linux operating system, XEN systems virtualization and Apache's Hadoop project, an open source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure, specifically MapReduce and the Google File System (GFS).
Excellent!
We've been big fans of Hadoop for a while now at Yahoo. In fact, we employ a number of engineers who primarily work on Hadoop--making sure that anyone (yes, even Google) can use it.
Now we can count both Google and IBM among our bigger users!
It's great to have such big visible partners working to spread the knowledge of Hadoop to more and more students.
Mail Storage: Unlimited vs. Still Counting?
Over on the Gmail Blog, I see More Gmail storage coming for all, which talks about speeding up the counter that governs the maximum size of an email box.
It's great to see them bringing up the issue of email storage again. It was back in March that Yahoo! Mail announced unlimited storage.
I'm not sure why they insist on counting anymore, but it's so nice of them to keep brining up mailbox sizes again. :-)
</sarcasm>
Posted by jzawodn at October 16, 2007 12:02 PM
Your post contains an unmatched tag. It's not quite clear from the context where the start tag should be...
Doh, my earlier comment got mangled. That should be "Your post contains an unmatched SARCASM tag...."
Google should move on to flouting how much storage they allow in Google Groups vs Y! Groups.
There is a typo in the last paragraph. It should read
"I'm not sure *why* they ...."
I think the storage issue has become a non-issue since Yahoo! Mail announced unlimited storage. Well in a sense is has been a non-issue for be because when my GMail account started to reach it's limit I just started a new account. Not very efficient or convenient but free storage is free storage.
