A look inside the mind of Google
Globe and Mail reporter Omar El Akkad visited Google’s headquarters to explore how, 15 years after its founding, the company is researching new ways to act as the intermediary between humans and the digital world. Many of its latest experimental projects seek to build the platforms and technologies that make devices like self-driving cars universally accessible – not by building the car, but by building the technology to automate it.
Denise Harwood diagnoses an overheated CPU at one of Google’s high-tech data centres in The Dalles, Oregon.Connie Zhou/The Canadian Press
These colorful pipes are responsible for carrying water in and out of Google’s Oregon data centre. The blue pipes supply cold water and the red pipes return the warm water back to be cooled.Connie Zhou
Mike Barham swaps out a motherboard.Connie Zhou
Patrick Davillier does a visual inspection of the water pipes running below the floor.Connie Zhou
This antenna is one of a group that serves as the primary signal source for hundreds of TV channels that make up Google Fiber's TV service.Connie Zhou
Colourful cables at Google’s data centre in Oregon.Connie Zhou
The fiber optic networks connecting Google’s sites can run at speeds that are more than 200,000 times faster than a typical home Internet connection. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling of this server room.Connie Zhou
This data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, provides over 115,000 square feet of space.Connie Zhou
More piping inside one of Google’s data centres.Connie Zhou
These pipes in Douglas County, Georgia, are kept ready with highly-pressurized water in case of a fire.Connie Zhou
Mayes County, Oklahoma -- Each of our server racks has four switches, connected by a different colored cable. We keep these colors the same throughout our data center so we know which one to replace in case of failure. When you're on a Google website , you're accessing one of the most powerful server networks in the known Universe. But what does that actually look like? Here's your chance to see inside what we're calling the physical Internet. ††Inside Google's high-tech data centres. Please credit the images to Connie Zhou/ Google.Connie Zhou
This is a server isle in Mayes County, Oklahoma. The green lights are the server status LEDs reflecting from the front of our servers.Connie Zhou