[fintler]

I wonder how fast this could do it:

http://www.lanl.gov/projects/trinity/specifications.php

They're claiming 87.0 TB/min on an 80PB filesystem, relative to Google's 36.2 TB/min.

[cshimmin]

That just their I/O bandwidth. There is computing overhead in actually doing the sort. Also google was using redundant persistence.

[tyre]

To add to this, Google's results were in 2012.