Scientists Break Terabyte Sort Barrier in 60 Seconds

Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego broke "the terabyte barrier" and a world record when they sorted more than one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes or 1 million megabytes) in just 60 seconds. To break the terabyte barrier for the Indy Minute Sort, the computer science researchers built a system made up of 52 computer nodes. Each node is a commodity server with two quad-core processors, 24 gigabytes (GB) memory and sixteen 500 GB disks – all inter-connected by a Cisco Nexus 5020 switch.
The data sorting challenges the computer scientists took on are quite different from the modest sorting that anyone with off the shelf database software can do by comparing two tables. One of the big differences is that data in terabyte and petabyte sorts is well beyond the memory capacity of the computers doing the sorting. In creating their heavy duty sorting system, the computer scientists designed for speed and balance. A balanced system is one in which computing resources like memory, storage and network bandwidth are fully utilized and as few resources as possible are wasted.