It appears from the graphs (yeah, I know) that he's probably doing trig (to locate the tweet) and collision detection (to determine the area of the city). He c

It appears from the graphs (yeah, I know) that he's probably doing trig (to locate the tweet) and collision detection (to determine the area of the city). He could also have more control over single precision algorithm choice than he would have via his original solution. It could be something as simple as pre-calculating the geolocation with a parallel CUDA kernel during ETL into PostGIS and bypassing its index generation. I also have an itchy feeling that there may have been some confusion regarding conversions between "times" and "percent", possibly multiple times. [1] Extrapolating that an iterative solution would take 40 days, without running it for 40 days, is tricky as well. Given multiple tweets in close proximity, PostGIS should benefit from caching the R-tree index. I'm not assuming the inventor is doing these things, as his db prof was impressed, as well as CSAIL and the body awarding his prize. [2] I think, if anything, the reporting is intended to be high-level enough to have more broad appeal, which makes it more difficult for us to evaluate the results in a Gedankenversuch. "Reduce slowness here..." [1] The sidebar says,'Some statistical algorithms run 70 times faster compared to CPU-based systems like MapReduce,' while the quote in the article says,'“The speed ups over PostGIS … I’m not an expert, and I’m sure I could have been more efficient in setting up the system in the first place, but it was 700,000 times faster,” Mostak said. “Something that would take 40 days was done in less than a second.”' [2] Hey, logical fallacies do not necessarily mean the argument is wrong!