Seven Wonders of the IT World

C.G. Lynch writes "The computer closest to the North Pole. The most intriguing data center. The biggest scientific computing grid. The little kernel that rocked the world. CIO.com has compiled a list of Seven Wonders of the IT World, some of the most impressive and unusual systems on the planet (and beyond)."

More than you might suspect...

[BWJones]

From the linked list:Secrecy level: High. Two reporters from the local newspaper are the only media who've been inside the compound and written about it (See "Inside the World of Google"): Google treats any and all details as though they belong to the National Security Agency.

Well.... I know they were trying to be funny, but the authors could be more correct that they might have known given the history of Google (startup partially funded by CIA $$s) and how tight they are with NGIA [nga.mil] (Google Earth [google.com] projects), CIA [cia.gov] etc..., it would not surprise me to see Google working intimately with NSA [nsa.gov]. After all, Google has been competing with NSA for PhD mathematicians for some time now (and winning) and it seems like a natural fit. Of course such a "hypothetical" collaboration would raise all sorts of ethical questions, but assuming one could appropriately compartmentalize those concerns, it could certainly be mutually beneficial.

Personally, I'd like to think that this little project [utah.edu] (when complete) will certainly contribute to the creation of one or more of the Seven Wonders of the IT world. After all, we all have little wetware parallel supercomputers sitting in the backs of our eyes that can process massive amounts of data, pre-encode it, filter it and more all while dealing with a certain level of data corruption, particularly in disease.

Link to one-page "printable" version

[The Iso]

http://www.cio.com/article/print/135700 [cio.com]

Re:More than you might suspect...

[BWJones]

Google has in the past had jobs available that required national security clearance.

Sure, but a security clearance can apply to lots of types of data and a diverse group of companies and government agencies. Everything from a basic collateral "secret" clearance (relatively easy to obtain) to "top secret" and compartmentalized programs are being worked on and participated in by people from not just government, but also a number of private companies. No big deal and I would certainly expect Google to have a significant number of folks possessing those clearances.

Re:The Dalles Data Center

[Johnny Mnemonic]

in fact the story on /. was probably from a shill for them in the first place

In fact, it absolutely was. Check the guy's email address on the linked submission; it goes to @cio.com; and the article was written by the same user. Please. I know it's was a fad and is now passe to complain about the editors on /., but can we have some more review of the articles that are posted than this? Not linking to the same domain as the submitter's email address would be start, especially if that's coupled with a uid that has accumulated some karma (so shows that they've been active in the community).

Re:Agreed:

[Runefox]

And, taking into account some of the concepts of RFC 1149 [wikipedia.org], we can reasonably assume that Voyager's data transfer to whoever/whatever/if anything receives it should be infinitely faster and higher-volume than anything we can even imagine.