>Google has cut down their processing time of sorting 1TB of data from 209 to 68 seconds. It only takes a third of the time it used to take. Makes me wonder how much of this is due to hard drive writes. Is RAM cheap enough now where you can use Gigabyte i-RAM to be the hard drive? I bet they could reduce their processing time if sorting involves the hard disk to some extent.

Official Google Blog: Sorting 1PB with MapReduce: “We are excited to announce we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.”