Parallel programming in modern web search engines

When a Search Engine responds to your query, thousands of machines from around the world have cooperated to produce your result. With a global reach of hundreds-of-millions of users, Search Engines are arguably the most commonly used massively-parallel computing systems on the planet.In this talk, we examine Web Search Engines as a case study of parallel programming in a practical context. We focus primarily on the practice of parallel programming, reviewing many ways in which parallel programming is used in a modern Search Engine. We also discuss briefly the principles of parallel programming, listing some of the principles that guide our use of parallelism and speculating a bit on how the mechanics of parallelism might better be automated in our context.