We don't know what kind of machines those are: "The MinuteSort run that Elson's team ran on 250 machines configured with 1,033 disk drives was able to rip thro

We don't know what kind of machines those are: "The MinuteSort run that Elson's team ran on 250 machines configured with 1,033 disk drives was able to rip through and sort 1,401 gigabytes of data in 60 seconds" What Google announced 4 years ago, from http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2008/11/sorting-1pb-with-mapreduce.html http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2008/11/sorting-1pb-with-mapre... "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" They both compare to earlier benchmarks to sound really flipping impressive, but we have too little detail to really know.