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What a great read. I am always curious what might be a good user experience that lets a user select "time" vs. "precision/accuracy" in an interface. A slider comes to mind, but has anyone seen a clever implementation that lets users choose how they want an answer delivered?

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Check this out: http://blinkdb.org/

A new research collaboration between UC Berkeley and MIT on probabilistic query answering. It allows users to specify trade-off between error confidence bound vs time.

"BlinkDB can execute a range of queries over a real-world query trace on up to 17 TB of data and 100 nodes in 2 seconds, with an error of 2–10%"

17 TB on 100 nodes? That a lot of nodes to hold 17 TB; on average 174 GB-ish of data each.

The speed is super impressive, but using 100 nodes makes this look more like a parallel processing achievement than "big data".

Even with parallel processing, assuming you can handle 1G of data per node per second (which is a fairly optimistic estimation for on disk data):

1G/node/sec * 100 nodes * 2 sec = 200G.

17TB is 85 times that number.

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