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Data Sorting World Record — 1 Terabyte, 1 Minute
An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego have broken the 'terabyte barrier' — and a world record — when they sorted more than a trillion bytes of data in 60 seconds. During this 2010 'Sort Benchmark' competition, a sort of 'World Cup of data sorting,' the UCSD team also tied a world record for fastest data sorting rate, sifting through one trillion data records in 172 minutes — and did so using just a quarter of the computing resources of the other record holder."
You almost think at this point that with super fast systems attention to algorithmic complexity hardly matters, it's good to see research still advancing and that there are areas where carefully designed algorithms make a huge difference. I look forward to seeing how they fare against the Daytona set.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, a sort of 'world cup of data sorting' ends in 'cup data of sorting world'.
You say that in a way where someone could misinterpret the interconnect as not being a big deal. Poor interconnects are why EC2 wasn't useful for HPC (their new option sounds somewhat better, but is limited to 16 nodes, IIRC) and why iPod Touches or similar devices have very few possible applications for clustering. If good interconnects weren't important, then clustering portable systems would be inevitable -- e.g., if you wanted more computing power for your laptop, you could just plug in your phone or mp3 player or iPad.
Impressive and all, but I take umbrage at calling it a "1 TB barrier". Is it disproportionately more difficult than sorting 0.99 TB?
Breaking "the sound barrier" was hard because of the inherent difficulty of going faster that sound in an atmosphere (sonic booms and whatnot). It was harder than simply travelling that fast would have been.
If this is just further evolution of sorting speed, it makes it a milestone, not a barrier.