NDLI: Columnsort lives! an efficient out-of-core sorting program

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Wisniewski, Leonard F. Cormen, Thomas H. Chaudhry, Geeta
Abstract	We present the design and implementation of a parallel out-of-core sorting algorithm, which is based on Leighton's columnsort algorithm. We show how to relax some of the steps of the original columnsort algorithm to permit a faster out-of-core implementation. Our algorithm requires only 4 passes over the data, and a 3-pass implementation is possible. Although there is a limit on the number of records that can be sorted—as a function of the memory used per processor—this upper limit need not be a severe restriction, and it increases superlinearly with the per-processor memory. To the best of our knowledge, our implementation is the first out-of-core multiprocessor sorting algorithm whose output is in the order assumed by the Parallel Disk Model. We define several measures of sorting efficiency and demonstrate that our implementation's sorting efficiency is competitive with that of NOW-Sort, a sorting algorithm developed to sort large amounts of data quickly on a cluster of workstations.
Starting Page	169
Ending Page	178
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	1581134096
DOI	10.1145/378580.378627
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2001-07-03
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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Columnsort lives! an efficient out-of-core sorting program