For Google, the Network is the Computer

For Google, the network really is the computer. “Ten years ago, we realized that we could not purchase, at any price, a datacenter network that could meet the combination of our scale and speed requirements,” said  Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow. “So, we set out to build our own datacenter network hardware and software infrastructure.”

That network now essentially allows Google to treat all computing resources within a single data center as one giant computer. “This means that each of 100,000 servers can communicate with one another in an arbitrary pattern at 10Gbps,” he said.

The architecture also tries to manage all the resources, everywhere on the network, as part of a single computing fabric.

“Our latest-generation Jupiter network has improved capacity by more than 100x relative to our first generation network, delivering more than 1 petabit/sec of total bisection bandwidth,” said Vahdat.

Google released four papers that details various aspects of its networking architecture, including its reliance on software defined networks.