1397

Faster Radix Sort via Virtual Memory and Write-Combining

Jan Wassenberg, Peter Sanders
Fraunhofer IOSB
arXiv:1008.2849 [cs.DS] (17 Aug 2010)

@article{wassenberg2010faster,

   title={Faster Radix Sort via Virtual Memory and Write-Combining},

   author={Wassenberg, J. and Sanders, P.},

   journal={Arxiv preprint arXiv:1008.2849},

   year={2010}

}

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Sorting algorithms are the deciding factor for the performance of common operations such as removal of duplicates or database sort-merge joins. This work focuses on 32-bit integer keys, optionally paired with a 32-bit value. We present a fast radix sorting algorithm that builds upon a microarchitecture-aware variant of counting sort. Taking advantage of virtual memory and making use of write-combining yields a per-pass throughput corresponding to at least 88 % of the system’s peak memory bandwidth. Our implementation outperforms Intel’s recently published radix sort by a factor of 1.5. It also compares favorably to the reported performance of an algorithm for Fermi GPUs when data-transfer overhead is included. These results indicate that scalar, bandwidth-sensitive sorting algorithms remain competitive on current architectures. Various other memory-intensive applications can benefit from the techniques described herein.
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