is this a complex problem that would take a lot of time and money and effort to solve?

modify the new server install procedure to add an extra step of "enter BIOS Setup, configure overhead shutdown settings", then allow the automatic redundancies they have designed for server failures to handle the rest (perhaps with a modified BIOS that has a wake-on-cool setting as well?)

can i haz huge piles of cash now for being smart enough to solve this complex problem?

That's exactly what I thought within 30 seconds of reading the artice, they already have a technology for dealing with outright server failure, why not have temp monitoring that gives a "virtual" fail and the existing redundancy picks up the slack.

The devil is probably in the detail however, in providing a graceful fail rather than an actual catastrophic hardware failure that user notice as a glitch in the matrix (eg. A search take 5ms longer than normal :-p)

In any case, it dosen't seem such an amazing revolutionary idea, but that's easy for me to say after the fact, and probably why I don't work for Google. :-)

Of course data centre load balancing has been done before - they're not talking about that. They're talking about widening the conditions of load balancing. Previously load balancers tend to either be simple round robin balancers or act based on the load already being handled by each data centre.

The ones we're talking about here are able to take into account the temperature/power requirements and balance accordingly. It's just enhancing the load balancing algorithms.

A few years back, didn't we have CPUs with clocks that slow as temperature rises.

If used, these processors would process tasks more slowly, and the load balancing would direct jobs away from them.

You just need global load balancing, or so you? Perhaps the load balancing would add a distance cost/weighting and redirect to a neighbour.

With a restartable process like building an index to dynamic web-pages, the requirements are less strict. For applications/services storing user data, then that is a different set of requirements.

The big enabler for high flexibility is making the workloads very portable, that's accomplished by virtualisation (which these days is relatively easy).

That statement isn't meant to trivialise the scale of the supporting infrastructure as in order to do this properly I guess you need to have lots of very stanfardised, very responsive, very high capacity and very integrated technology, this is also quite obvious and although not easy, it's not 'magic'

Perhaps the magic ingredient is trending and predictive as oppose to reactive balancing of the workloads, this isn't my specialist area but isn't that the way the electricity companies work ?

Am I the only the one that smells bullshit ?