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Title: Theoretically-Efficient and Practical Parallel In-Place Radix Sorting
Parallel radix sorting has been extensively studied in the literature for decades. However, the most efficient implementations require auxiliary memory proportional to the input size, which can be prohibitive for large inputs. The standard serial in-place radix sorting algorithm is based on swapping each key to its correct place in the array on each level of recursion. However, it is not straightforward to parallelize this algorithm due to dependencies among the swaps. This paper presents Regions Sort, a new parallel in-place radix sorting algorithm that is efficient both in theory and in practice. Our algorithm uses a graph structure to model dependencies across elements that need to be swapped, and generates independent tasks from this graph that can be executed in parallel. For sorting $n$ integers from a range $r$, and a parameter $K$, Regions Sort requires only $O(K\log r\log n)$ auxiliary memory. Our algorithm requires $O(n\log r)$ work and $O((n/K+\log K)\log r)$ span, making it work-efficient and highly parallel. In addition, we present several optimizations that significantly improve the empirical performance of our algorithm. We compare the performance of Regions Sort to existing parallel in-place and out-of-place sorting algorithms on a variety of input distributions and show that Regions Sort is faster than optimized out-of-place radix sorting and comparison sorting algorithms, and is almost always faster than the fastest publicly-available in-place sorting algorithm.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1845763
NSF-PAR ID:
10137104
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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