A Study of Sort Algorithms for Multiprocessor Database Machines

This paper presents and analyzes algorithms for parallel execution of sort operations in a general multiprocessor architecture. We consider both internal and external sorting algorithms. For the latter, we study the performance of sorting algorithms that are derived from sorting algorithms that only do comparison and exchange by replacing each comparison-exchange with a B-way merge. In particular, we propose a new algorithm called the modified block bitonic sort. We then present the results of analyzing the performance of these different parallel external sorting algorithms. We show that the modified block bitonic sort is the fastest of the algorithms over a wide range of values of interest to us.