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Data Sorting World Record — 1 Terabyte, 1 Minute

Posted by kdawson on from the out-of-sorts dept.

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."

5 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't sound so hard... by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    As long as you use Intelligent Design Sort.

  2. Amendments to the Geek Heirarchy by Lord_of_the_nerf · · Score: 5, Funny

    LARPers > Fan-fiction writers > Professional Data Sorting Competitors > Furries

  3. Important Details.... by pdxp · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... to make it clear that you won't be doing it (TritonSort, thanks for leaving that out kdawson) on your desktop at home:
    • 10Gbps Networking
    • 52 servers x 8 cores each = 416 CPUs
    • 24 GB RAM per server = 1,248 GB
    • ext4 filesystem on each, presumably with hardware raid

    I think this is cool, but.... how fast is it in a more practical situation?

    source

  4. What makes it a barrier? by Patch86 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What makes it a barrier? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 5, Funny

      Impressive and all, but I take umbrage at calling it a "1 TB barrier". Is it disproportionately more difficult than sorting 0.99 TB?

      At 1TB the attraction of the 1-bits gets so large that if you are not careful, your data collapses into a black hole.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.