Chemical engineering process design can become very complex and highly nonlinear (in fact, Nick Sahinidis' group in the chemical engineering department at CMU c

Chemical engineering process design can become very complex and highly nonlinear (in fact, Nick Sahinidis' group in the chemical engineering department at CMU created BARON explicitly for solving these kinds of problems to global optimality — see http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron http://archimedes.cheme.cmu.edu/?q=baron). Granted, Google's systems don't involve chemical reactions, but that doesn't automatically mean that designing these data centers is a simple task.