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Largest Computing Applications

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ August 12, 2008 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

While writing a SQL-based search function (the simple kind with basic string matching against ordered data) today, a question regarding the size of the google cache ensued in my lab.

After about 20 seconds of discussion, someone said, “so they have a whole lot of servers then, huh?”

I retorted that it’s probably the single biggest application on the planet in terms of computing power. Of course, I followed this up by silently asking said google cache about this question. Interestingly, after a half dozen tries (”largest server farms”, “largest application”, “largest global applications”, etc), I couldn’t find a definitive list. Heck, I really couldn’t find any list.

So I thought I’d put one out there for public consumption. Please debate and correct me. It’s all guesswork.

(This is based on total flops devoted to a single application infrastructure, not based on other trivialities, like number of CPUs, number of racks, or raw storage capacity. There’s also probably a distinction between different branches of government, but I’m way out of my league there.)

1. Google. The www cache, youtube, picasa, and all the rest.
2. The DoD. You know, those guys that invented the internet?
3. Amazon. S3, alexa, the wayback machine, and of course their tiny product database.
4. Microsoft. Hotmail, Live, windowsupdate, msdn.
5. Yahoo. Their tombstone aside, they’ve got a web cache and tons of services. All of that info has to be stored somewhere.
6. China’s IT Infrastructure. Suppressing all of that free speech has to take some computing power, right?

Let the debate ensue…

Tags: computing power, lists, scalability, server farms