Quoted: Could micropayments be the key to monetizing YouTube? The New York Times has an interesting article today about the history and future of micropayments.

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2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability: Building a Scalable Resource Mgmt System for ... all » Grid Computing Speaker: Khalid Ahmed, Platform Computing Corp.

This talk will describe the architecture and implementation details for building a highly scalable resource management layer that can support a variety of applications and workloads. This technology has evolved from large scale computing grids deployed in production at customers such as Texas Instruments, AMD, JP Morgan, and various government labs. We will show how to build a centralized dynamic load information collection service that can handle up to 5000 nodes/20,000 cpus in a single cluster. The service is able to gather a variety of system level metrics and is extensible to collect up to 256 dynamic or static attributes of a node and actively feed them to a centralized master. A built-in election algorithm ensures timely failover of the master service ensuring high-availability without the need for specialized interconnects. This building block is extended to multiple clusters that can be organized hierarchically to support a single resource management domain that can span multiple data centers. We believe the current architecture could scale to 100,000 nodes/400,000 cpus. Additional services such as a distributed process execution service, and a policy-based resource allocation engine which leverage this core scale-out clustering service are described. The protocols, communication overheads, and various design tradeoffs that were made the development of these services will be presented along with experimental results from various tests, simulations and production environments. Khalid Ahmed works as the Chief Architect and Director of Technology Research at Platform Computing. In over 12 years at Platform he worked in a number of roles including development, product management and architecture. His work on distributed scheduling, wide-area resource sharing, workload management, system automation, virtualization management, and high availability

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2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability: MapReduce, BigTable, and Other Distributed ... all » System Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets Jeff Dean, Google, Inc. Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet, but it also poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines, from lower-level systems issues like computer architecture and distributed systems to applied areas like information retrieval, machine learning, data mining, and user interface design. In this talk, I'll highlight some of the behind-the-scenes pieces of infrastructure that we've built in order to operate Google's services. Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Fellow in Google's Systems Infrastructure Group. While at Google he has worked on Google's crawling, indexing, query serving, and advertising systems, implemented several search quality improvements, and built several major pieces of Google's distributed computing infrastructure. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996 working with Craig Chambers on compiler optimization techniques for object-oriented languages.

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2007 Google Seattle Conference on Scalability: Lessons In Building Scalable Systems ... all » Speaker: Reza Behforooz

Since launching Google Talk in the summer of 2005, we have integrated the service with two large existing products: Gmail and orkut. Each of these integrations provided unique scalability challenges as we had to handle a sudden big increase in the number of users. Today, Google Talk supports millions of users and handles billions of packets per day. I will discuss several practical lessons and key insights from our experience that can be used for any project. These lessons will cover both engineering and operational areas. Reza Behforooz is a Staff Engineer at Google and is currently the technical lead for the Google Talk servers. He's passionate about building large systems and working on communication products in an attempt to make the world a smaller place. While at Google, he has primarily worked on Google Talk, Gmail, orkut, Google Groups, and shared infrastructure used by several Google applications. Reza holds a BS from Cornell and a MS from Stanford in Computer Science. Prior to Google, he held various engineering and management positions at Microsoft and two startups, Zaplet and Epiphany. «

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Quoted: From the top of Manhattan all the way down to the tip following Broadway.

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Quoted: Here's a screencast showing off Google Maps new feature, Street View.

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Google Tech Talks April 13, 2007 ABSTRACT Since its inception in the 1980s, the popularity of the Internet has been growing exponentially, resulting in a mass of shared knowledge and fast, cheap communication. Hand-in-hand with these developments, we have seen the birth of a plethora of new valuable systems and services ranging from web search and email to blogging and social networking sites. Perhaps the most essential system for monetizing such web services is online advertising. In this talk, I will first present an overview of the most common market mechanism for online advertising, namely pay-per-click auctions. I will then discuss some of the challenges in the design of these auctions including the threat of click fraud and the complications introduced by the existence of budget-constrained advertisers.