Ordinal Software's NSort algorithm set the world sorting record earlier this year -- 33 GB read, sorted, and re-written in 59 seconds, and 1 TB read, sorted, and re-written in 33 minutes. Hardware was an NEC 32-way Itanium2 server with 128 GB ram, 8 QLogic Fibre Channel HBAs @ 2 Gb/sec, and 8 Eurologic SAN blocks w/ 14 disks (36gb / 15k RPM) each, 112 total.
It's designed for SMP or NUMA machines and is multi-OS. I'm curious if modern cluster interconnects (10 GigE or 10 Gb Inifiniband) could work with this approach, assuming one had the appropriate systems software.
