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Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture

IEEE Micro, vol. 23 (2003), pp. 22-28

Abstract

Amenable to extensive parallelization, Google's Web search application lets different queries run on different processors and, by partitioning the overall index, also lets a single query use multiple processors. To handle this workload, Google's architecture features clusters of more than 15,000 commodity class PCs with fault-tolerant software. This architecture achieves superior performance at a fraction of the cost of a system built from fewer, but more expensive, high-end servers.