If Spanner is a "variant" than it introduced something new, an improvement. You sure are jumping through hoops trying to diminish things. Most of computer scien

If Spanner is a "variant" than it introduced something new, an improvement. You sure are jumping through hoops trying to diminish things. Most of computer science was invented in the 50, 60s and 70s when the low hanging fruit was easy to get, now a lot of it is incremental gains. Just like the astounding pace of advances in mathematics in the 1700s/1800s/1900s can't be bested in the 00s, progress is slower as the easy stuff has been mapped out already. Besides which, there's a difference between inventing say, Newtonian Physics, and building an interplanetary ship for human space flight. It is in the application of much of computer science to extremely large systems where most of the work is being done, and frankly, experienced gathered building the world's largest database and most trafficked site gives you insight into new ways to engineer things that you don't necessarily figure out from basic application of CS principles. I could probably design a basic bridge or house given what I learned of civil engineering, but chances are I could never design the Burj Dubai with that information. My point is, the way Google applied things like MapReduce was based on their experience of solving web services problems. HPC hyper-computing typically looks at problems of simulation, like QED/QCD, nuclear explosions, climate, finance, oil geology, et al. The difference focus leads to different pattern of application, and there is new value created in the papers published by both sides. Google's datacenter configurations don't look anything like say, BlueGene. And when you look at what Google is doing with machine learning, few organizations have the resources and data to pull it off. Sure, lots of people have run the algorithms before on small sets, but few actually have daily data from a billion people flowing into them.