Alibaba Cloud Sets New CloudSort World Record in 2016 Sort Benchmark Competition

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, won the world championship of the CloudSort category in the 2016 Sort Benchmark competition. Alibaba Cloud set new world record of $1.44/TB, breaking AWS’ record of $4.51/TB in 2014.

CloudSort, among all Sort Benchmark competition categories, offers the greatest practical significance by challenging cloud computing efficiency and competing based on the lowest cost to sort 100 TB of data. The accolade reinforces Alibaba Cloud’s global cloud computing leadership and further strengthens its capabilities to make more cost efficient, affordable and inclusive products.

“Instead of solely relying on hardware, the best cloud computing offerings of today are designed with the capabilities to maximize cost and operational efficiency. This requires cloud providers to effectively utilize resources, employ the most efficient algorithm and continuously optimize it. Service providers must demonstrate world-leading standards in every operational aspect from supply chain, operating system, virtualization, network, to storage and computing,” said Chu Ba, Alibaba Cloud’s researcher leading the team in the competition.

The winning team consists of members from Nanjing University, Alibaba Group, and Databricks Inc. Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s ECS, the team achieved the best result of $1.44/TB by deploying a pay-as-you-go pricing model and building an affordable system with an Intel processor, 8GB memory, a 40GB Ultra Cloud Disk, and 135GB SSD Cloud Disks.

In the 2015 Sort Benchmark competition, Alibaba Cloud broke four world records in GraySort and MinuteSort categories, which were measured on computing speed and scale. Helming the champion title in two consecutive years with consistent record-breaking performance, Alibaba Cloud is a testimonial that China’s cloud computing potential is capable of constant breakthroughs.