Sort Benchmark Home Page


New: We have finalized the rules for 2010. Our main changes are:


Please see process changes below and the FAQ for more details.

We will be posting the mid-year (pre Jan 1, 2010) results shortly. Thanks to all contestants for bearing through all the new rule changes.

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:

Year 2009 Results
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.

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

2-way tie:

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


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

Minute

2009, 500 GB

Hadoop

1406 nodes x (2 Quadcore Xeons, 8 GB memory, 4 SATA)
Owen O'Malley and Arun Murthy
Yahoo Inc.

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

Joule
108 recs

2007, 8.6 kJoules

CoolSort

11,600 records sorted / joule
Mobile Core 2 Duo, 13 SATA laptop disks, Nsort
Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs),
Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)

Joule
109 recs

2007, 88 kJoules

CoolSort

11,300 records sorted / joule
Mobile Core 2 Duo, 13 SATA laptop disks, Nsort
Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs),
Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)

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

2007, 2920 kJoules

CoolSort

3,425 records sorted / joule
Mobile Core 2 Duo, 13 SATA laptop disks, Nsort
Suzanne Rivoire (Stanford), Mehul A. Shah (HP Labs),
Partha Ranganathan (HP Labs), Christos Kozyrakis (Stanford)

Common Rules

All the sort benchmarks share the following ground rules:

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.

Process

New Entries

The submission deadline for the 2010 contest is 15 May 2010.

We will accept early entries for the following year before 15 November 2010 if the new result exceeds the current record by 50% (1.5 times the rate or size). Approved early entries will be published on this site. From 15 November 2010 to 1 April 2011, any entries exceeding the previously published record (including early entries) will be accepted.

Past Winners
Daytona Indy
Gray - -
Penny

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

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

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

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
- -
Joule
109 recs
- -
Joule
1010 recs
- -
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 (mehul dot shah at hp dot com).