1TB in 68 Seconds - New Google Data Sorting Record

Google has recently announced new strides in its race to process the world's information - they've been able to sort 1 terabyte of data across 1 thousand computers in a only 68 seconds. The previous record of the the same data (1TB) was sorted 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!

Google also acknowledges that they had triple redundancy and 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).

What's next? I guess the exabyte would be a huge step towards instant live data sorting...

Google Unveils, "Web History"

The post explains the benefit of having access to all of your search information from a daily and longterm prospective. While extremely useful for finding your own trailings about the web, it now becomes a major privacy concern, since all of that info is housed on Google. Yes, one can make the point that it has always resided on Google and was never available to the user, but now it is just that much more targetted.

While I am a proponent of harvesting useful data and being able to track your own endeavors (mainly because my memore sucks...), this is problematic, because the web user has no control over the data or any particular situation tied into it... a problem in my book. Nonetheless, this is the advent of a new realm and advancement in user searches - thank you Google!