Tight bounds on the complexity of parallel sorting
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Columnsort lives! an efficient out-of-core sorting program
Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures
Getting More from Out-of-Core Columnsort
ALENEX '02 Revised Papers from the 4th International Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments
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Previous implementations of out-of-core columnsort limit the problem size to N ≤(M/P)3/2, where N is the number of records to sort, P is the number of processors, and M is the total number of records that the entire system can hold in its memory. We implemented two variations to out-of-core columnsort that relax this restriction. Subblock columnsort is based on an algorithmic modification of the underlying columnsort algorithm, and it improves the problem-size bound to N ≤(M/P)5/3 / 42/3 but at the cost of additional disk I/O. M-columnsort changes the notion of the column size in columnsort, improving the maximum problem size to N ≤M3 / 2 but at the cost of additional computation and communication. Experimental results on a Beowulf cluster show that both subblock columnsort and M-columnsort run well but that M-columnsort is faster. A further advantage of M-columnsort is that it handles a wider range of problem sizes than subblock columnsort.