Can sorting be compared to matrix computation?
I have a question about two articles recently on HN. In one of them a physicist says that<p>"There is no computer on Earth that could possibly store such a big matrix in its memory"<p>On the other Google says that they sorted "1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers" in six hours.<p>I know one is talking about matrix computation the other sorting. But is there a way to compare these two to verify if what the physicist claims is wrong and that google could actually store and make that computation?<p>Thanks<p>http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html<p>Virtual quarks make the calculations much more complicated, involving a matrix of more than 10,000 trillion numbers, says Stephan Dürr of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing in Jülich, Germany, who led the team.<p>"There is no computer on Earth that could possibly store such a big matrix in its memory," Dürr told New Scientist, "so some trickery goes into evaluating it."<p>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/sorting-1pb-with-mapreduce.html<p>It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers.