Title
AA-Sort: A New Parallel Sorting Algorithm for Multi-Core SIMD Processors
Abstract
Many sorting algorithms have been studied in the past, but there are only a few algorithms that can effectively exploit both SIMD instructions and thread-level parallelism. In this paper, we propose a new parallel sorting algorithm, called Aligned-Access sort (AA-sort), for shared-memory multi processors. The AA-sort algorithm takes advantage of SIMD instructions. The key to high performance is eliminating unaligned memory accesses that would reduce the effectiveness of SIMD instructions. We implemented and evaluated the AA-sort on PowerPC® 970MP and Cell Broadband EngineTM. In summary, a sequential version of the AA-sort using SIMD instructions outperformed IBM's optimized sequential sorting library by 1.8 times and GPUTeraSort using SIMD instructions by 3.3 times on PowerPC 970MP when sorting 32 M of random 32-bit integers. Furthermore, a parallel version of AA-sort demonstrated better scalability with increasing numbers of cores than a parallel version of GPUTeraSort on both platforms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1109/PACT.2007.12
PACT
Keywords
Field
DocType
cell broadband enginetm,aa-sort algorithm,better scalability,sequential version,aligned-access sort,new parallel,simd instruction,high performance,parallel version,optimized sequential,multi-core simd processors,simd instructions,sorting algorithm,parallel processing,thread level parallelism,sorting
Integer,Computer science,sort,Parallel computing,SIMD,Algorithm,Sorting,Multi-core processor,PowerPC,Sorting algorithm,Scalability
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1089-795X
0-7695-2944-5
47
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.78
10
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hiroshi Inoue1775.88
Takao Moriyama2686.20
Hideaki Komatsu341034.00
Toshio Nakatani474156.80