Overlapping Computations, Communications and I/O in Parallel Sorting

In this paper we present a new parallel sorting algorithm which maximizes the overlap between the disk, network, and CPU subsystems of a processing node. This algorithm is shown to be of similar complexity to known efficient sorting algorithms. The pipelining effect exploited by our algorithm should lead to higher levels of performance on distributed memory parallel processors. In order to achieve the best results using this strategy, the CPU, network and disk operations must take comparable time. We suggest acceptable levels of system balance for sorting machines and analyze the performance of the sorting algorithm as system parameters vary