Parallel Sorting on Sequent Symmetry using FastThread Library

Ola Sigurdson1
Toshiba R&D Center

Abstract:

Achieving a high degree of parallelism with efficient parallel sorting algorithms is difficult on shared memory multi-processor computers. I have investigated a few different approaches to the problem on a Sequent Symmetry computer with four processors, with the FastThread light-weight thread library. [1] For external algorithms the investigation was purely theoretical, but for internal algorithms I measured the performance with different input data.

The measurement results show that it is possible to reach almost perfect parallelism and reasonably good efficiency for internal sorts of large element sets with short comparison times, and small elements sets with long comparison times.



Footnotes

... Sigurdson1
The work was carried out under the excellent guidance of Hideo Segawa.


© Ola Sigurdson 1991-08-20 Ola@Sigurdson.SE