Page 284 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Web Programming

Notes “When Google went looking for someone to ramp up its computer network, Larry and
Sergey hired a brain surgeon, Dr Jim Reese,” informs the book. “Named Google’s
operations chief, Reese managed the company’s burgeon collection of computer hardware.”
Vise narrates the story of how the company “cobbled together a virtual supercomputer
from cheap, commodity PCs.” Back at the Googleplex, the garden-variety PCs got ripped
apart, and all `unnecessary parts that would eat up computing power and resources’ disposed
of, to build streamlined computers, strung together with “software, wiring, and the special
sauce that made Google lightning fast.”
More than one lakh inexpensive PCs, stacked in refrigerator-size racks, remain ‘strictly
off-limits to outsiders’, notes Vise. “PCs burn out and are not replaced. Instead other PCs
take over.”
Learn about the 20 per cent rule in Google from Krishna Bharat, a software engineer in the
company’s research group.
The rule stipulates that engineers spend at least 20 per cent of their time, or one day a
week, working on whatever projects interested them.
“The 20 per cent rule was a way of encouraging innovation, and both Brin and Page saw
this as essential to establishing and maintaining the right culture and creating a place
where bright technologists would want to work and be motivated to come up with
breakthrough ideas.” 3M had something similar - the 15 per cent rule - many years earlier,
notes Vise. A success product that had emerged from such a pursuit was Post-it Notes.
“Rather than having employees moonlighting as inventors at home - with the risk that an
idea will either fail from lack of resources or succeed to the point that they quit to pursue
it full-time - Google gives them both freedom and resources,” observes Vise.
When speaking at the Israeli school, Brin had said, “We run Google a little bit like a
university. We have lots of projects, about 100 of them. We like to have small groups of
people, three or so people, working on projects. Some of them, for example, are related to
molecular biology. Others involve building hardware... The only way you are going to
have success is to have lots of failures first.”

And Brin toys with the idea of plugging into brain ‘a little version of Google’, as you’d
know from the final chapter, titled ‘Googling your genes.’
Dr Craig Venter, who had decoded the human genome, is of the view that genetic
information is going to be the leading edge. “Working with Google, we are trying to
generate a gene catalogue to characterise all the genes on the planet and understand their
evolutionary development. The massive computing power can be used “to analyse vast
quantities of data with billions of parts” says Dr Alan E. Guttmacher, deputy director of
the National Human Genome Research Institute, cited in the book.
“We are beginning to have incredible tools to understand the biology of human diseases
in ways we never have before, and to come up with novel ways to prevent and treat
them.”
Fabulous read.

All about ADO.NET
SAHIL Malik, who has been working as a consultant in Microsoft technology for about a
decade, and also leading the office of Emerging Technologies at the National Cancer
Institute, has written
Contd...

278 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY