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.
