HUG Meetup August 2012: Random vs. Sequential

In this talk we dive into the details of how sequential access affects performance. In the first part of the talk, we show that sequential access is important not only for hard drives, but all storage components used in today's computers. Based on this observation, we then discuss statistical techniques to improve performance of common analytical tasks. In particular, we show how randomness can be used strategically to improve speed and possibly accuracy.