Microsoft Research Introduces Record-Beating MinuteSort Tech 118
mikejuk writes "A team from Microsoft Research has taken the lead in the MinuteSort data sorting test using a specially-devised technology: Flat DataCenter Storage. The figures are impressive — 1401 gigabytes in 60 seconds, using 1033 disks across 250 machines. Not only is this three times as much as the previous record, but also, it uses only one sixth of the hardware resources, according to a blog post about the test from Microsoft. One thing that's interesting about the success is the technology used. While solutions such as Hadoop and MapReduce are traditionally used for working with large data sets, Microsoft Research created its own technology called the 'Flat Datacenter Storage,' or FDS for short. This isn't just academic research, of course. The team from Microsoft Research has already been working with the Bing team to help Bing accelerate its search results, and there are plans to use it in other Microsoft technologies."
First post (Score:5, Funny)
Sorted by Microsoft
Re:This is what I like about Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly right. Functional self-driving cars aren't really innovations like a fancy coffee table [wikipedia.org] is!
People don't really need silly things like augmented reality glasses or street-level pictures of their mapped destinations - they need internally-inconsistent UIs that change at every major OS version! Thank God we have Microsoft to innovate for us!
Other technologies... (Score:5, Funny)
The team from Microsoft Research has already been working with the Bing team to help Bing accelerate its search results, and there are plans to use it in other Microsoft technologies.
So Bing is going to scrape their search results from Google *and* other search engines? :-)
Re:This is what I like about Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
"Their work does lots of good for the world."
For the world? Or for Microsoft?
Dude, seriously! You do realise this algorithm has been developed to help Microsoft sort through all of the outstanding 'serious security flaw found in IE6' tickets? Why else do you think they'd need 1033 hard drives, and 250 machines?