Install-Time System for Automatic Generation of Optimized Parallel Sorting Algorithms

Sorting is a fundamental algorithm used extensively in computer science as an intermediate step in many applications. The performance of sorting algorithms is heavily influenced by the type of data being sorted, and the machine being used. To assist in obtaining portable performance for sorting algorithms, we propose an install-time system for automatically constructing sequential and parallel sorts that are highly tuned for the target architecture. Our system has two steps: first a hybrid sequential divide-and-conquer sort is constructed and then this algorithm is parallelized using a shared work-queue model. To evaluate our system, we compare automatically generated sorting algorithms to sequential and parallel versions of the C++STL sort. The generated sorts are shown to be competitive with STL sort on sequential systems and to outperform the parallel STL sort on a 4 processor Xeon server.