About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Publication
PACT 2007
Conference paper
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 Engine™. 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. © 2007 IEEE.