Fascinating muse by Topix.net on some plausible ways and means that are likely under the hood of the server farm at Google. While nobody on the outside actually knows for certain, skrenta proposes that the real reason Google can roll out amazing web applications others would fear is all a matter of lowering the cost of the CPU-second ...

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

[ Source: Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google's Power ]