PARC, and they’ve created new-age software like Google MapReduce and the Google File System and the Google BigTable database. These massive creations run across thousands of computers and are now the basis for how . MapReduce and GFS gave rise to Hadoop, software now used by everyone from Facebook and eBay to countless everyday businesses. Borg, a means of carefully spreading computing tasks across entire data centers of machines, has already inspired the new computing system that underpins Twitter. Google’s John Wilkes. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED John Wilkes, who oversees the creation of Google’s next incarnation of Borg, once worked at HP Labs. But for decades, he struggled to get his creations out into the larger world. At Google, that’s no longer much of a problem. The Google research model, , “increases the value of the ideas, and provokes more need to be circumspect, compared to when I was working on ideas that weren’t going to make it into a product.” Jeff Dean and SanjayGhemawat — perhaps the two most respected research engineers inside Google — once worked in the world class labs at fallen computer giant DEC. And they too will that Google’s approach to research is a cry from what you’ll find at the old tech behemoths. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIRED It happens time and again. Google will hire the world’s top researchers and push them so very close to the front lines. There’s Geoff Hinton, the University of Toronto professor who is into things like Android and Google+. There’s Rob Pike, the former Bell Labs researcher who is remaking Google’s online service with a brand new programming languages called Go. There’s Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor who is now pushing Google into the brave new world of self-driving cars. And, yes, there’s Babak Parvis, who once collaborated with Microsoft and now works at Google, not only on contacts lenses, but Google Glass. Yes, Google is following Microsoft with its new lens. But thatmeans the gadget may actually change the world, rather than gathering dust in a lab. Share Comment
