SAN DIEGO, July 29 (UPI) -- U.S. computer scientists say they've broken "the terabyte barrier," setting a world record for sorting a terabyte, 1,000 gigabytes, of data in just 60 seconds.

At a "Sort benchmark" competition, dubbed the "Word Cup of data sorting," scientists from the University of California, San Diego also set a record for the fastest data sorting rate of 1 trillion data records sorted in 172 minutes, a university release said Wednesday.

Rapid data sorting has become important for companies looking for competitive advantages in the marketplace, the release said.

Rapid data sorting has also become important for Web sites.

Advertisements on Facebook pages, custom recommendations on Amazon, and up-to-the-second search results on Google all result from sorting amounts of data measured not in terabytes but in petabytes -- 1,000 terabytes.

"Companies are pushing the limit on how much data they can sort, and how fast," UCSD computer science Professor Amin Vahdat said.