Powerful Production Equipment
Lack of funds and lack of space helped the Google co-founders to build a unique, highly automated factory, using the latest means of distributed data processing. The entire Google network is based on a model for processing large data sets and dispatching tasks across a large cluster, using MapReduce and the Google File System.
MapReduce distributes tasks by running programs in parallel on a large cluster of commodity machines. The MapReduce system balances and manages program execution, allowing Google's programmers to utilize the resources of a large distributed system easily. According to Google, "a typical MapReduce computation processes many terabytes of data on thousands of machines."[85]
The Google File System ...