Implementation of a Parallel Radix Sort on Cell Processor

Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) possesses tremendous raw computation power. Nevertheless, developing programs that can fully exploit that computation power is challenging. Cell Speed Challenge 2007 gives its contestants the opportunity to strive for the highest performance of data sorting on Cell. This work describes the design and implementation of a parallel radix sort. Data buffering, scalar code optimizations are employed to make the algorithm work effectively on Cell. Evaluation results show that significant performance can be achieved.