A team of researchers at Microsoft have set a new data sorting record, beating the old record (in a big way) set by Yahoo.
The team, led by Jeremy Elson in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond, set the new sort benchmark by using a radically different approach to sorting called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). The team’s system sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines vs. 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009.