I'd actually be curious to see what would happen if you tried to sort a petabyte with 3800 EC2 nodes. I wonder how much worse your performance would be? EC2 ins

I'd actually be curious to see what would happen if you tried to sort a petabyte with 3800 EC2 nodes. I wonder how much worse your performance would be? EC2 instance-local storage is pretty slow by default (the "first-write" problem), but if you used multiple EBS volumes on each node you might be able to get pretty good I/O performance.