100 Scalable Innovation
data centers. To make the system reliable as a whole, Google software would
store data in multiple locations and retrieve it intact even when some of the
drives failed.
Let’s go further. Can you imagine a computer on the scale of a country
or a whole planet? It should work well beyond the pages of the World Wide
Web. If you are a sci- fan, some popular stories immediately come to mind.
Solaris, the planet-brain with long-distance telepathic abilities in a Stanislaw
Lem novel. The Matrix, a world-size computer harvesting energy from human
bodies in the Wachowsky brothers’ movies. Pandora, the sentient planet from
James Cameron’s Avatar. The Borg—a part-human, part-machine species that
shares a collective intelligence ...