The book goes into the architecture of such WSC’s, workloads & software infrastructure, hardware building blocks, datacenter basics, energy & power efficiency, costs, dealing with failures & repairs and the challenges in designing such machines.

Some interesting points from the book:
- programmers must be aware of the relatively scarce cluster-level bandwidth resources and try to exploit rack-level networking locality
- distribution of peak power usage – CPU’s 33%, DRAM 30%
- cost-efficiency metrics for a large SMP server and a low-end, PC-class server
- At the moment, the sweet spot for many large-scale services seems to be at the low-end range of server-class machines
- Energy management being a key issue. Focus on reducing all energy-related costs capital, operating expenses, and environmental impacts.
- The average real-world datacenter and the average server are far too inefficient, mostly because efficiency has historically been neglected and has taken a backseat relative to reliability, performance, and capital expenditures. As a result, the average WSC wastes two thirds or more of its energy
- As a rule of thumb, most large datacenters probably cost around $12–15/W to build and smaller ones cost more
- The total cost of a server will be primarily a function of the power it consumes, and the server’s purchase price will matter less. In other words, over the long term, the datacenter facility costs (which are proportional to power consumption) will become a larger and larger fraction of total cost

You can download the book here.

Bill Gross: How a global debt crisis trickles down to investors

Stanford Law: Q & A with Charlie Munger (pdf)

Farnam Street: The forgotten lessons of 2008

Interesting Interview with Jim Rickards, former general counsel of LTCM

reddit.com Interviews Peter Norvig

Anand Rajaraman: What lies beneath: harnessing the deep web

Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

Gabriel Weinberg interviews Garry Tan of Posterous

Pete Michaud: Achievement Porn

Patrick McKenzie: Lesson from Madlibs Signup Fad: Do Your Own Tests

The Diamond Formation: Making sure your side wins the sound-byte battle

An Excerpt on Dr. Michael Burry from Michael Lewis’s new book: Betting on the Blind Side

Caterina Fake: Getting the Startup Equation Right

Tony Wright: Considering Y Combinator (or any seed funding)?

Rand Fishkin: SEO for startups

From this image, a comment on reddit on the speed of the Antelope

Steve Blank: No Accounting For Startups

Steve Yegge: Ten Challenges/ Books

Jason Cohen: Enough with the “expert” guilt

Jesse Schell’s talk on the future of games (video)

Mike Maples Talks Venture Capital And Thunder Lizards (video)

Jason Sobel: Making Facebook 2x Faster

Max Ventilla: The idea was that we should add value to people’s existing habits not try to change them.

Jimmy Wales on Getting Traction for wikipedia & wikia

Panjiva: PageRank for shipping (interesting startup)

Arthur De Vany: From chaos, order

Interesting use of data aggregation: Please Rob me

Alexis Ohanian: Reasons to self publish books & Step by step guide on how to publish a book

Jared Dudley – Most Athletic Hands in History (video)

Paolo Pellegrini’s PSQR Capital Annual Letter

Rebekah Cox: Early Quora Design Notes

The deepest point in the ocean:Marian Trench

The technical details regarding Siri

Paul Graham interview with How Y Combinator Helped 172 Startups Take Off. Helpful follow up on Hacker News with answers from Paul Graham.

Chatroulette’s mysterious creator is Andrey Ternovskiy

The $5 Guerrilla User Test

Some alternatives to GMail

NYT: Luge Crash at the Olympics (viz.)

Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (pdf)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine (pdf)

Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Distributed Caching Protocols for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web (pdf)

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World