Integer sorting on multicores: some (experiments and) observations
Alexandros V. Gerbessiotis

TL;DR
This paper experimentally evaluates various integer sorting algorithms on multicore systems, comparing their performance across different architectures and programming models, highlighting the challenges of architecture-dependent performance modeling.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive experimental analysis of serial and parallel radix-sort, bitonic-sort, and odd-even transposition sort implementations on multicore platforms using multiple programming libraries.
Findings
Performance modeling is difficult due to architecture-dependent features.
Simple architecture-independent models can still yield useful insights.
Some algorithms perform better with few keys despite theoretical inefficiency.
Abstract
There have been many proposals for sorting integers on multicores/GPUs that include radix-sort and its variants or other approaches that exploit specialized hardware features of a particular multicore architecture. Comparison-based algorithms have also been used. Network-based algorithms have also been used with primary example Batcher's bitonic sorting algorithm. Although such a latter approach is theoretically "inefficient", if there are few keys to sort, it can lead to better running times as it has low overhead and is simple to implement. In this work we perform an experimental study of integer sorting on multicore processors using not only multithreading but also multiprocessing parallel programming approaches. Our implementations work under Open MPI, MulticoreBSP, and BSPlib. We have implemented serial and parallel radix-sort for various radixes and also some previously little…
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Taxonomy
TopicsParallel Computing and Optimization Techniques · Algorithms and Data Compression · Interconnection Networks and Systems
