Sort Benchmark Home Page

New: The original deadline for 2013 entries has passed. There were entries for 10GB, 100GB and 1TB JouleSort -- those contests are closed. We are extending the deadline for the other sort contests until Sunday, May 5 at 11:59 PM (23:59) Pacific Daylight Time.

Background

Until 2007, the sort benchmarks were primary defined, sponsored and administered by Jim Gray. Following Jim's disappearance at sea in January 2007, the sort benchmarks have been continued by a committee of past colleagues and sort benchmark winners. The Sort Benchmark committee members include:

Chris Nyberg of Ordinal Technology
Mehul Shah of Amiato
Naga Govindaraju of Microsoft

Top Results
	Daytona	Indy
Gray	2011, 0.725 TB/min TritonSort 1,000,000,000,000 records in 8,274 seconds 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5096 switch Alex Rasmussen, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego	2011, 0.938 TB/min TritonSort 1,000,000,000,000 records in 6,395 seconds 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5096 switch Alex Rasmussen, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego
Penny	2011, 286 GB psort 2.7 Ghz AMD Sempron, 4 GB RAM, 5x320 GB 7200 RPM Samsung SpinPoint F4 HD332GJ, Linux Paolo Bertasi, Federica Bogo, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy	2011, 334 GB psort 2.7 Ghz AMD Sempron, 4 GB RAM, 5x320 GB 7200 RPM Samsung SpinPoint F4 HD332GJ, Linux Paolo Bertasi, Federica Bogo, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy
Minute	2012, 1,401 GB Flat Datacenter Storage 256 heterogeneous nodes, 1033 disks Johnson Apacible, Rich Draves, Jeremy Elson, Jinliang Fan, Owen Hofmann, Jon Howell, Ed Nightingale, Reuben Olinksy, Yutaka Suzue Microsoft Research	2012, 1,470 GB Flat Datacenter Storage 256 heterogeneous nodes, 1033 disks Johnson Apacible, Rich Draves, Jeremy Elson, Jinliang Fan, Owen Hofmann, Jon Howell, Ed Nightingale, Reuben Olinksy, Yutaka Suzue Microsoft Research
Joule 10⁸ recs	2012, 1,393 Joules FAWNSort 71,800 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 16GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University	2012, 1,393 Joules FAWNSort 71,800 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 16GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University
Joule 10⁹ recs	2012, 21.0 KJoules FAWNSort 47,500 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University	2012, 21.0 KJoules FAWNSort 47,500 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University
Joule 10¹⁰ recs	2012, 229 KJoules FAWNSort 43,700 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University	2012, 229 KJoules FAWNSort 43,700 records sorted / joule Intel Core i7-2700K 3.5 GHz, 8GB RAM, Nsort, 16 x 300 GB Intel 710 Series SSDs, 1 160 GB Intel 510 Series SSD Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University
Joule 10¹² recs	2011, 132 MJoules TritonSort 7,595 records sorted / joule 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5096 switch Alex Rasmussen, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego	2011, 103 MJoules TritonSort 9,700 records sorted / joule 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5096 switch Alex Rasmussen, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego

Common Rules

All the sort benchmarks share the following ground rules:

Must sort to and from operating system files on secondary storage.
No raw disk usage allowed since we are trying to test the IO subsystem.
File or device striping (RAID 0) are allowed (encouraged) to get bandwidth. If file striping is used then the concatenated files must form a sorted file.
The output file must be created as part of the sort.
Time includes the launching of the sort program.
The sort input records must be 100 bytes in length, with the first 10 bytes being a random key.
Use the gensort record generator to create the input records.
The sort output file must be validated for correct key order and checksum.
The hardware used should be commercially available (off-the-shelf), and unmodified (e.g. no processor over or under clocking).

Sort Benchmarks

GraySort	Metric: Sort rate (TBs / minute) achieved while sorting a very large amount of data (currently 100 TB minimum).
PennySort	Metric: Amount of data that can be sorted for a penny's worth of system time. Originally defined in AlphaSort paper.
MinuteSort	Metric: Amount of data that can be sorted in 60.00 seconds or less. Originally defined in AlphaSort paper.
JouleSort	Metric: Amount of energy required to sort either 10⁸, 10⁹ or 10¹⁰ records (10 GB, 100 GB or 1 TB). Originally defined in JouleSort paper.
TeraByte Sort	Metric: Elapsed time to sort 10¹² bytes of data. The TeraByte benchmark is now deprecated because it became essentially the same as MinuteSort.
Datamation Sort	Metric: Amount of time to sort one million records (100 MB). This is the original sort benchmark, defined in A Measure of Transaction Processing Power With 25 others Datamation, V 31.7, April 1985, pp 112-118. Originally, winners took 1 hour, now 1 second! So the benchmark is deprecated.

Benchmark Categories

For each sort benchmark, there are two categories:

Daytona (stock car)	Indy (formula 1)
Sort code must be general purpose.	Need only sort 100-byte records with 10-byte keys.

Complete Rules

For detailed rules, see the frequently asked questions (FAQ) .

Process

Medals are awarded each year at ACM SIGMOD.
Entrants can contact us to get their result "certified" by April 1.
Entries must include a document describing the algorithm and the hardware in enough detail so that others could reproduce the result.

New Entries

The submission deadline for the 2012 contest is 1 April 2012.

Past Winners
	Daytona	Indy
Gray	2009, 0.578 TB/min Hadoop 100 TB in 173 minutes 3452 nodes x (2 Quadcore Xeons, 8 GB memory, 4 SATA) Owen O'Malley and Arun Murthy Yahoo Inc.	2010, 0.582 TB/min TritonSort 1,000,000,000,000 records in 10,318 seconds 47 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5020 switch Alex Rasmussen, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego Alexander Pucher Vienna University of Technology 2009, 0.564 TB/min DEMSort 1,000,029,388,800 records in 10,628 seconds 195 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 16 GB memory, 4x250GB disks) 288-port InfiniBand 4xDDR switch Mirko Rahn, Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler and Tim Kieritz Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Penny	2009, 223 GB psort 2.6 Ghz AMD Athlon LE 1640, 4 GB RAM, 5x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Linux Paolo Bertasi, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy 2008, 181 GB 1,812 M records in 2,408 seconds psort 2.4 Ghz AMD Athlon 64, 2 GB RAM, 4x160GB SATA disks Linux Paolo Bertasi, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy 2007, 39 GB TokuMergeSort 330$ system 2 Ghz AMD Athlon 4200+, 512 MB RAM, 2x80GB SATA disks Bradley C. Kuszmaul , MIT 2006, 34 GB Bytes-Split-Index Sort (BSIS) $760 system 1.8 GHz AMD, 1 GB RAM, 4x80GB SATA disks, WindowsXP Xing Huang and BinHeng Song School of Software, Tsinghua U. , Beijing, China Bo Huang Math & CS, Hunan U. of Technology , Zhuzhou, China 2005, 15 GB PostManSort 979 sec on a $951 Wintel 2 SATA Robert Ramey 2004, 10 GB THsort (105 million records) 1098 seconds on a $857 Linux/AMD Peng Liu, Yao Shi, Li Zhang, Kuo Zhang, Tian Wang, ZunChong Tian, Hao Wang, Xiaoge Wang Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2000, 4.5 GB HMsort Brad Helmkamp, Keith McCready Stenograph LLC 1999, 2.6 GB HMsort Brad Helmkamp, Keith McCready Stenograph LLC 1998, 1.3 GB PostmanSort/NT Robert Ramey Software	2010, 252 GB OzSort 2.0 2.8 Ghz AMD Athlon II 240, 4GB RAM, 6x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA-II, Linux Nikolas Askitis Univ. Melbourne, Australia 2009, 248 GB psort 2.6 Ghz AMD Athlon LE 1640, 4 GB RAM, 5x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Linux Paolo Bertasi, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy 2009, 246 GB OzSort 2.7 Ghz AMD Kuma X2 7750+, 4GB RAM, 5x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Linux Nikolas Askitis and Ranjan Sinha Univ. Melbourne, Australia 2008, 190 GB psort 2.4 Ghz AMD Athlon 64, 2 GB RAM, 4x160GB SATA disks, Linux Paolo Bertasi, Marco Bressan and Enoch Peserico Univ. Padova, Italy 2006, 59 GB GpuTeraSort 3 GHz Pentium IV, 2 GB RAM, 7800GT Nvidia graphics card, 9x80GB SATA disks (4 data and 5 runs) WindowsXP Naga Govindaraju, Ritesh Kumar, Dinesh Manocha, Jim Gray U. North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA 2003, 43 GB SheenkSort Linux/AMD system Lei Yang, Hui Huang, Zheng Wan, Tao Song Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2001, 12 GB DMsort Araron Darling, Alex Mohr, U. Wisconsin, Madison 2000, 4.5 GB HMsort Brad Helmkamp, Keith McCready Stenograph LLC 1999, 2.6 GB HMsort Brad Helmkamp, Keith McCready Stenograph LLC 1998, 1.5 GB NT Sort Microsoft
Minute	2009, 500 GB Hadoop 1406 nodes x (2 Quadcore Xeons, 8 GB memory, 4 SATA) Owen O'Malley and Arun Murthy Yahoo Inc. 2007, 214 GB TokuSampleSort tx2500 disk cluster 400 nodes x (2 processors, 6-disk RAID, 8 GB memory) Bradley C. Kuszmaul, MIT 2006, 40 GB NeoSort Windows, Fujitsu 32 Itanium2, 128 SAN disks Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology Corp 2004, 34 GB Nsort Windows, 32 Itanium2, 2,350 disks Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal 2000, 12 GB Nsort SGI 32 cpu Origin IRIX 1998, 5.8 GB Nsort SGI 32 cpu Origin IRIX 1997, 3.5 GB Nsort IRIX Challenge Ordinal Technology Corp 1995, 1.1 GB AlphaSort Nyberg	2011, 1353GB TritonSort 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5096 switch Alex Rasmussen, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego 2010, 1014 GB TritonSort 52 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 24 GB memory, 16x500GB disks) Cisco Nexus 5020 switch Alex Rasmussen, Radhika Niranjan Mysore, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Michael Conley, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego Alexander Pucher Vienna University of Technology 2009, 955 GB DEMSort 195 nodes x (2 Quadcore processors, 16 GB memory, 4x250GB disks) 288-port InfiniBand 4xDDR switch Mirko Rahn, Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler and Tim Kieritz Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2007, 264 GB TokuSampleSort tx2500 disk cluster 400 nodes x (2 processors, 6-disk RAID, 8 GB memory) Bradley C. Kuszmaul, MIT 2005, 125 GB SCS Linux, 80 Itanium2, 2,520 SAN disks Jim Wyllie, IBM Almaden Research 2004, 32 GB Nsort 32 x Itanium2 WinServer Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology 2000, 21.8 GB NOW+HPVMsort 64 nodes WinNT Luis Rivera, Xianan Zhang, Andrew Chien UCSD 1999, 10,3 GB NOW+MPI HPVMsort Luis Rivera, UIUC Andrew Chien, UCSD 1998, 8.41 GB NowSort 95 UltraSparc + MyrinetSolaris UC Berkeley 1997, 3.5 GB Nsort SGI/Nyberg,Koester Nsort/Irix/Challenge 1995, 1.08 GB AlphaSort Nyberg
Joule 10⁸ recs	2011, 1,430 Joules FAWNSort 69,900 records sorted / joule Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, 16GB RAM, Nsort, 7 x 120 GB Intel 510 Series SSDs Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh Vijay Vasudevan, Lawrence Tan, David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University 2010, 2.2 KJoules FAWNSort 44,900 records sorted / joule Intel Xeon L3426 1.86GHz, 12GB RAM, Nsort, Fusion-io ioDrive (80GB), 4 x Intel X25-E (3 x 32GB, 1 x 64GB) Vijay Vasudevan, Lawrence Tan, David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Padmanabhan Pillai Intel Labs Pittsburgh 2010 Jan 1, 4.0 KJoules FlashSort 24,800 records sorted / joule Quad Core AMD Opteron 2373 2.01GHz, 16GB RAM 80GB FusionIO John D. Davis (Microsoft Research) Suzanne Rivoire (Sonoma State University) 2007, 8.6 KJoules CoolSort 11,600 records sorted / joule Mobile Core 2 Duo, 13 SATA laptop disks, 2GB RAM, Nsort Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs), Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)	2011, 1,430 Joules FAWNSort 69,900 records sorted / joule Intel Core i5-2400S 2.5 GHz, 16GB RAM, Nsort, 7 x 120 GB Intel 510 Series SSDs Padmanabhan Pillai, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Intel Labs Pittsburgh Vijay Vasudevan, Lawrence Tan, David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University 2010, 2.2 KJoules FAWNSort 44,900 records sorted / joule Intel Xeon L3426 1.86GHz, 12GB RAM, Nsort, Fusion-io ioDrive (80GB), 4 x Intel X25-E (3 x 32GB, 1 x 64GB) Vijay Vasudevan, Lawrence Tan, David Andersen Carnegie Mellon University Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, Padmanabhan Pillai Intel Labs Pittsburgh 2010, 2.3 KJoules EcoSort 42,600 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x Super Talent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2010 Jan 1, 2.8 KJoules EcoSort 35,500 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x SuperTalent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Joule 10⁹ recs	2010, 27.9 KJoules Nsort 35,800 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x Super Talent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2007, 88 KJoules CoolSort 11,300 records sorted / joule Mobile Core 2 Duo, 13 SATA laptop disks, 2GB RAM, Nsort Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs), Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)	2010, 25.1 KJoules EcoSort 39,900 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x Super Talent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2010 Jan 1, 27.5 KJoules EcoSort 36,400 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x SuperTalent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2009, 87 KJoules OzSort 11,600 records sorted / joule 2.6 Ghz AMD Athlon LE-1640, 4GB RAM, 7x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA, Linux Nikolas Askitis and Ranjan Sinha Univ. Melbourne, Australia
Joule 10¹⁰ recs	2011, 1,900 KJoules Nsort 5,273 records sorted / joule 2 x Intel Xeon X5550 2.67 GHz, 48 GB RAM 8 x 1TB Seagate 7200RPM SATA HDD Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2007, 2920 KJoules CoolSort 3,425 records sorted / joule Intel Xeon 5130 2GHz, 4GB RAM, 12 x Seagate Barracuda ES 7200rpm 500GB, Nsort Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs), Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)	2010, 572 KJoules DEMSort 17,500 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x Super Talent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany 2010 Jan 1, 724 KJoules DEMSort 13,800 records sorted / joule Intel Atom 330 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM, 4 x SuperTalent UltraDrive GX MLC 256GB Andreas Beckmann, Ulrich Meyer Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany Peter Sanders, Johannes Singler Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
TeraByte (deprecated)	2008, 3.48 minutes Hadoop 910 nodes x (4 dual-core processors, 4 disks, 8 GB memory) Owen OMalley, Yahoo 2007, 4.95 min TokuSampleSort tx2500 disk cluster 400 nodes x (2 processors, 6-disk RAID, 8 GB memory) Bradley C. Kuszmaul , MIT 2004, 33 min Nsort Windows, 32 Itanium2, 2,350 SAN disks Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology 2000, 49 min Tandem FastSort 68x2 Compaq Tandem Sandia Daivd Cossock , Sam Fineberg, Pankaj Mehra , John Peck Tandem 1998, 151 min Nsort SGI 32x Origin 2000 Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology	2007, 3.28 minutes TokuSampleSort tx2500 disk cluster 400 nodes x (2 processors, 6-disk RAID, 8 GB memory) Bradley C. Kuszmaul , MIT 2005, 7.25 min SCS Linux, 80 Itanium2, 2,520 SAN disks Jim Wyllie , IBM Almaden Research 2000, 18 min SPsort 1952 SP cluster 2168 disks Jim Wyllie , IBM Almaden Research 1998, 151 min Nsort SGI 32x Origin 2000 Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology
Datamation (deprecated)		2001, .44 sec Datamation 2001: A Sorting Odyssey NOW-sort on 32 Linux PCs (2xP3(550 MHz), 1 GB, 5x9GB disks). Florentina Popovici, John Bent, Brian Forney, Andrea Arpaci Dusseau, Remzi Arpaci Dusseau 2000, .998 sec Mitsubishi DIAPRISM Hardware Sorter HP 4 x 550MHz Xeon PC server + 32 SCSI disks, Windows NT4 Shinsuke Azuma, Takao Sakuma, Tetsuya Takeo, Takaaki Ando, Kenji Shirai Mitsubishi Electric Corp. 1999, 1.18 sec Millennium Sort 16x2 Dell NT Myrinet Phillip Buonadonna, Spencer Low, Josh Coates UC Berkeley 1997, 2.4 sec NowSort Arpaci-Dusseau UC Berkeley 1996, 4.2 sec Nsort SGI Challenge Chris Nyberg, Charles Koester Ordinal Technology 1994, 7 sec AlphaSort Nyberg, DEC 1993, 9 sec AlphaSort Nyberg, DEC 1988, 28 sec Cray1 Weinberger 1987, 980 sec Tandem Tsukerman

This page is maintained by Chris Nyberg (chris dot nyberg at ordinal dot com) and Mehul Shah (mashah at gmail dot com).