Hilariously, in 2008 Google was hugely resistant to this idea. DARPA had just put out an RFP for a new way of running computationally dependent tasks that curre

Hilariously, in 2008 Google was hugely resistant to this idea. DARPA had just put out an RFP for a new way of running computationally dependent tasks that currently ran on super computers on a 'shared nothing' architecture (which is what Google ran at the time (and I believe they still do). I had done some research in that space when I was at NetApp looking at decomposing network attached storage services into a shared nothing architecture so I had some idea of the kinds of problems that were the "hard bits" in getting it right. I recall pointing out to Platform's management that if Google could provide an infrastructure that solved these sorts of problems with massive parallelism that currently required specialized switching fabrics and massive memory sharing we would have something very special. But at the time it was a non-starter, way too much money to be made in search ads to bother with building a system for something like the 200 customers in the world total. I didn't care one way or the other if Google did it so after running at the wall of "under 2s" a couple of times I just said "fine, your loss."