Google Voice Architecture

Hi High Scalability community!

Do you have any information on the architecture behind Google Voice, the new service by Google that offers one Google Number for all your calls and SMS? It is based on GrandCentral who has been acquired by Google 2 years ago.

Thanks!

New Book: Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers

Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today's web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In his new book Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.

Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories:

• JavaScript - Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.


• Network - Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.


• Browser - Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today's rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With this book, you'll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites' load times and make them respond even faster.

About the Author

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug. He is also co-chair of Velocity 2008, the first web performance conference sponsored by O'Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Scaling Memcached: 500,000+ Operations/Second with a Single-Socket UltraSPARC T2

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns. Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip)... Object Size / Ops/Sec / Bandwidth 100 bytes / 530,000 / 1.2 Gb/s 2048 bytes / 370,000 / 6.9 Gb/s 4096 bytes / 255,000 / 9.2 Gb/s Check out the link for more details!

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Wolfram|Alpha Architecture

Making the world's knowledge computable

Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.

Answer Engine vs Search Engine

When Wolfram|Alpha launches later today, it will be one of the most computationally intensive websites on the internet. The Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine is an "answer engine" that is able to produce answers to various questions such as

• What is the GDP of France?
• Weather is Springfield when David Ortiz was born
• 33 g of gold
• LDL vs. serum potassium 150 smoker male age 40
• life expectancy male age 40 finland
• highschool teacher median wage

Wolfram|Alpha excels at different areas like mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, astronomy, chemistry, life sciences, geology, business and finance as demonstrated by Steven Wolfram in his Introduction screencast.

The Stats

• Abour 10,000 CPU cores at launch
• 10+ trillion of pieces of data
• 50,000+ types of algorithms
• Able to handle about 175 million queries per day
• 5+ million lines of symbolic Mathematica code

The Computers Powering Computable Knowledge

There is no way to know exactly how much traffic to expect, especially during the initial period immediately following the launch, but the Wolfram|Alpha team is working hard to put reasonable capacity in place. As Stephen writes in the Wolfram|Alpha blog Alpha will run in 5 distributed colocation facilities. What computing power have they gathered in these facilities for launch day? Two supercomputers, just about 10,000 processor cores, hundreds of terabytes of disks, a heck of a lot of bandwidth, and what seems like enough air conditioning for the Sahara to host a ski resort. One of their launch partners, R Systems, created the world’s 44th largest supercomputer (per the June 2008 TOP500 list - it is listed as 66th per the latest Top500 list). They call it the R Smarr. It will be running Wolfram|Alpha on launch day! R Smarr has a Sum Rmax of 39580 GFlops using Dell DCS CS23-SH, QC HT 2.8 GHz computers, 4608 cores, 65536 GB of RAM and Infiniband interconnect. Dell is another of the launch partners with a data center full of quad-board, dual-processor, quad-core Harpertown servers. What does it all add up to? The ability to handle 175 million queries (yielding maybe a billion) per day—over 5 billion queries (encompassing around 30 billion calculations) per month.

The Launch of Wolfram|Alpha

Watch a live webcast of the Wolfram|Alpha system being brought online for the first time on

• Friday, May 15, beginning at 7pm CST

The First Killer App of The New Kind of Science

The Genius behind Wolfram|Alpha is Stephen Wolfram. He is best know for his ambitious projects: Mathematica and A New Kind of Science (NKS). May 14, 2009 marks the 7th anniversary of the publication of his book A New Kind of Science. Stephen explains is his blog post: But for me the biggest thing that’s happened this year is the emergence of Wolfram|Alpha. Wolfram|Alpha is, I believe, going to be the first killer app of NKS.

Status

That it should be possible to build Wolfram|Alpha as it exists today in the first decade of the 21st century was far from obvious. And yet there is much more to come. As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

How Mathematica Made Wolfram|Alpha Possible?

Wolfram|Alpha is a major software engineering development to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. It is developed and deployed entirely with Mathematica—in fact, Mathematica has uniquely made Wolfram|Alpha possible. Here's why.

• Computational knowledge and intelligence
• High-performance enterprise deployment
• One coherent architecture
• Smart method selection
• Dynamic report generation
• Database connectivity
• Built-in, computable data
• High-level programming language
• Efficient text processing and linguistic analysis
• Wide-ranging, automated visualization capabilities
• Automated importing
• Development environment

Information Sources

• Wolfram|Alpha
• About Wolfram|Alpha
• Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Introduction to Wolfram|Alpha screencast
• A New Kind of Science
• Wolfram Research - Mathematica
• How Mathematica Made Wolfram|Alpha Possible?
• The Secret behind the Computational Engine in Wolfram|Alpha
• More info expected after the launch... stay tuned!

Congratulations Stephen!

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Who Has the Most Web Servers?

An interesting post on DataCenterKnowledge!

• 1&1 Internet: 55,000 servers
• Rackspace: 50,038 servers
• The Planet: 48,500 servers
• Akamai Technologies: 48,000 servers
• OVH: 40,000 servers
• SBC Communications: 29,193 servers
• Verizon: 25,788 servers
• Time Warner Cable: 24,817 servers
• SoftLayer: 21,000 servers
• AT&T: 20,268 servers
• iWeb: 10,000 servers
• How about Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, GoDaddy, Facebook? Check out the post on DataCenterKnowledge and of course here on highscalability.com!

Presentations: MySQL Conference & Expo 2009

The Presentations of the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 held April 20-23 in Santa Clara is available on the above link.

They include:

• Beginner's Guide to Website Performance with MySQL and memcached by Adam Donnison


• Calpont: Open Source Columnar Storage Engine for Scalable MySQL DW by Jim Tommaney


• Creating Quick and Powerful Web Applications with MySQL, GlassFish, and NetBeans by Arun Gupta


• Deep-inspecting MySQL with DTrace by Domas Mituzas


• Distributed Innodb Caching with memcached by Matthew Yonkovit and Yves Trudeau


• Improving Performance by Running MySQL Multiple Times by MC Brown


• Introduction to Using DTrace with MySQL by Vince Carbone


• MySQL Cluster 7.0 - New Features by Johan Andersson


• Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS by Allan Packer


• SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming Solid State Disk Revolution by Matthew Yonkovit


• This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google by Mark Callaghan

Scalability Perspectives #6: Lew Tucker – Virtual Data Centers in the Open Cloud

Scalability Perspectives is a series of posts that highlights the ideas that will shape the next decade of IT architecture. Each post is dedicated to a thought leader of the information age and his vision of the future. Be warned though – the journey into the minds and perspectives of these people requires an open mind.

Lew Tucker

Lew Tucker is the Vice President and CTO of Sun Microsystems’ Cloud Computing initiative. Lew’s career has been focused on scalable computing and web development. Lew worked at Sun Microsystems through the 1990’s. In 2002, Lew joined Salesforce.com and led the design and implementation of App Exchange. After Salesforce.com, Lew was CTO at Radar Networks, where he focused on the scalable design and build out of its semantic web service.

The Sun Cloud API

Sun has recently announced its open RESTful API for creating and managing cloud resources, including compute, storage, and networking components. Lew and his team is busy implementing Sun's cloud offering. His background and experience from the creation of Salesforce App Exchange has helped the team to create a simple but flexible set of APIs. Lew envisions open, interoperable clouds based on community standards such as the Cloud API.

Your Own Virtual Data Center in the Cloud

Lew Tucker has demonstrated the use of the Sun Cloud by building a Virtual Data Center built of virtual servers, switches and storage. He commented on the announcement in this interview. Check out the information sources below to understand the perspective of Lew Tucker on Cloud Computing and learn more about the relationship of the Sun and the Clouds. The TechCrunch roundtable is especially interesting.

Information Sources

• Lew Tucker on CrunchBase, Freebase, Project Kenai, Twine
• InformationWeek: Sun's Innovative Drag, Drop, & Deploy Virtual Datacenter Designer
• eWeek interview: Sun Cloud Group CTO Talks Sun Cloud
• The Open Sun Cloud APIs
• Cloud Computing at Sun
• TechCrunch: Cloud Computing Roundtable
• Overcast Show #5: Dec 11, 2008 - with Lew Tucker, Sun Microsystems

Click to read more ...

Sun to Announce Open Cloud APIs at CommunityOne

One of the key items Sun will be talking about in today's cloud computing announcement (at 9AM EST/6AM PST) will be Sun's opening of the APIs that we'll use for the Sun Cloud. We're making these available so that those who are interested will be able to review and comment on these APIs. Continuing our commitment to openness, we're making these APIs available via the Creative Commons Version 3.0 license. ...

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Books: Web 2.0 Architectures and Cloud Application Architectures

I am excited about the upcoming release of two books on Web 2.0 and Cloud Application Architectures by O'Reilly. Web 2.0 Architectures (estimated release in May 2009) What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know Using several high-profile Web 2.0 companies as examples, authors Duane Nickull, Dion Hinchcliffe, and James Governor have distilled the core patterns of Web 2.0 coupled with an abstract model and reference architecture. The result is a base of knowledge that developers, business people, futurists, and entrepreneurs can understand and use as a source of ideas and inspiration. Featured architectures include Google, Flickr, BitTorrent, MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Cloud Application Architectures (estimated release in April 2009) Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud This book by George Reese offers tested techniques for creating web applications on cloud computing infrastructures and for migrating existing systems to these environments. Specifically, you'll learn about the programming and system administration necessary for supporting transactional web applications in the cloud -- mission-critical activities that include orders and payments to support customers. The second book is available online at O'Reilly as a Rough Cuts Version so you might already had a chance to check it out. If so, do you like it?

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Cisco and Sun to Compete for Unified Computing?

A recent InfoWorld article claims that "With Cisco expected to enter the blade market and Sun expected to offer networking equipment, things could get interesting awfully fast." How does this effect your infrastructure strategy and decisions? Would you consider to build scalable web applications on the Cisco Unified Computing System? Or would you consider to build a router out of a server with the use of OpenSolaris and Project Crossbow as the article suggests? Will any of these initiatives change the way we build scalable web infrastructure or are these just attempts to sale these systems? What do you think?

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