Google's Omega: Is it Alive?

The Register - 11.04.13 by Jack Clark

'Biological' signals ripple through massive cluster management monster

One of Google's most advanced data center systems behaves more like a living thing than a tightly controlled provisioning system. This has huge implications for how large clusters of IT resources are going to be managed in the future.

"Emergent" behaviors have been appearing in prototypes of Google's Omega cluster management and application scheduling technology since its inception, and similar behaviors are regularly glimpsed in its "Borg" predecessor, sources familiar with the matter confirmed to The Register.

Emergence is a property of large distributed systems. It can lead to unforeseen behavior arising out of sufficiently large groups of basic entities.

Just as biology emerges from the laws of chemistry; ants give rise to ant colonies; and intersections and traffic lights can bring about cascading traffic jams, so too do the ricocheting complications of vast fields of computers allow data centers to take on a life of their own.

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