GFS II...rebuilding the file system from the ground up...now that's a challenge. I wonder what advantages this will give them over their competitors.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/google_file_system_part_deux/

already discussed and blogged... http://blogoscoped.com/forum/158818.html

DPic...is it the same project though? The article does not mention anything specifically about search or the 'caffeine' initiative, but does mention Gmail and YouTube as well as some limitations of their other 'interactive' type systems. It discusses how the original GFS wasn't designed to really handle and scale to other non-search related activities they now provide. And they don't mention if it has been completed or not, so it implies that its still a work in progress that has not reached a production or beta status yet.

I dunno...maybe the 2 projects are directly related or even the same. I wasn't able to tell based on the article...although the timing certainly is coincidental.

I'm sure The Register story had the same project link than that forum thread includes.

In fact The Register pointed to its own article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/11/google_caffeine_web_search/
which had sandbox link...

[Moved and merged from "Google File System v2.0: Dawn of the multiplying master nodes" – Tony]

"....
In an interview with the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), Google's Sean Quinlan says that nearly a decade after its arrival, the original Google File System (GFS) has done things he never thought it would do.

"Its staying power has been nothing short of remarkable given that Google's operations have scaled orders of magnitude beyond anything the system had been designed to handle, while the application mix Google currently supports is not one that anyone could have possibly imagined back in the late 90s," says Quinlan, who served as the GFS tech leader for two years and remains at Google as a principal engineer.
...."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/12/google_file_system_part_deux/

Yup, now they have an update at the beginning of the story that GFS II is "apparently" part of the new Caffeine infrastructure. Sounds like they didn't really connect the dots between the stories when they first published the article. So, now it seems that Caffeine is one 'part' of the new GFS infrastructure as are their other major apps besides search. I'd really like to see the performance ramp up on Gmail, YouTube, Maps and Docs.