(3)
Google has announced new technological strides: they have been able to sort 1 terabyte of data across one-thousand computers in a mere 68 seconds. (Previously, the same record of 1TB was across 910 computers and took 209 seconds.) For one petabyte of data, it took Google 6 hours and 2 minutes to do the sorting -- and the sorted data gets moved to 48,000 hard drives (crazy!)
Google also acknowledges that they had triple redundancy -- the data was backed up on 3 hard drives. Could it be that if you reduced that redundancy, this would all be much quicker? Not necessarily, since storing may not be part of the sorting algorithm that was recorded (and storing the data could have still been ongoing after the sort had been completed).
Do you call this "nerd erotica?" Forum members say it is.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Robert
12/01/2008 11:16 am
That's fast! But at the moment they are just really big numbers. I wonder if each byte was a single brick how many trucks that would be sorting and processing? Yet another really big number no doubt ;)
Jessica
12/01/2008 03:46 pm
This is phenomenal! No wonder 61% of all searches today are done on Google!
No Name
12/01/2008 09:05 pm
Really fast, sorting data only Gigs of data takes minutes. I wonder what computers they use.