INDUSTRY

The New York Times is reporting that on the banks of the Columbia River along the Oregon-Washington border, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a supercomputing center as big as two football fields and two cooling plants four stories high. The sprawling complex is a large expansion of a worldwide high-performance network handling billions of search queries a day, even advertising services on our site and growing number of other services. Melanie Conner for The New York Times -- Google is building two supercomputing centers, top and left, each the size of a football It's not alone: Microsoft and Yahoo are also building there in Wenatchee and Quincy, Washington, 130 miles to the north because electricity's cheap and the network connections are good. Plus the river means access to plenty of water for cooling. But Google remains far ahead in the global data-center race, and the scale of its complex here is evidence of its great ambition. Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex. The fact that Google is behind the data center, referred to locally as Project 02, has been reported in the local press. But many officials in The Dalles, including the city attorney and the city manager, said they could not comment on the project because they signed confidentiality agreements with Google last year. Google has found that for search engines, every millisecond longer it takes to give users their results leads to lower satisfaction. "Google is like the Borg," said Milo Medin, a computer networking expert who was a founder of the 1990's online service @Home, referring to the robotic species on "Star Trek" that was forcibly assembled from millions of species and computer components. "I know of no other carrier or enterprise that distributes applications on top of their computing resource as effectively as Google." This report comes from the New York Times article by JOHN MARKOFF and SAUL HANSELL. For the latest breaking news, visit NYTimes.comWeb site.