Engineering Parallel String Sorting

We discuss how string sorting algorithms can be parallelized on modern multi-core shared memory machines. As a synthesis of the best sequential string sorting algorithms and successful parallel sorting algorithms for atomic objects, we first propose string sample sort. The algorithm makes effective use of the memory hierarchy, uses additional word level parallelism, and largely avoids branch mispredictions. Then we focus on NUMA architectures, and develop parallel multiway LCP-merge and -mergesort to reduce the number of random memory accesses to remote nodes. Additionally, we parallelize variants of multikey quicksort and radix sort that are also useful in certain situations. Comprehensive experiments on five current multi-core platforms are then reported and discussed. The experiments show that our implementations scale very well on real-world inputs and modern machines.Comment: 46 pages, extension of "Parallel String Sample Sort" arXiv:1305.115

Parallel String Sample Sort

We discuss how string sorting algorithms can be parallelized on modern multi-core shared memory machines. As a synthesis of the best sequential string sorting algorithms and successful parallel sorting algorithms for atomic objects, we propose string sample sort. The algorithm makes effective use of the memory hierarchy, uses additional word level parallelism, and largely avoids branch mispredictions. Additionally, we parallelize variants of multikey quicksort and radix sort that are also useful in certain situations.Comment: 34 pages, 7 figures and 12 table

Parallel Multiway LCP-Mergesort

In this bachelor thesis, multiway LCP-Merge is introduced, parallelized and applied to create a fully parallel LCP-Mergesort, as well as NUMA optimized pS5. As an advancement of binary LCP-Mergesort, a multiway LCP-aware tournament tree is introduced and parallelized. For dynamic load balancing, one well-known and two new strategies for splitting merge work packages are utilized. Besides the introduction of fully parallel multiway LCP-Mergesort, further focus is put on NUMA architectures. Thus \u27parallel Super Scalar String Sample Sort\u27 (pS5) is adapted to the special properties of these systems by utilising the parallel LCP-Merge. Moreover this yields an efficient and generic approach for parallelizing arbitrary sequential string sorting algorithms and making parallel algorithms NUMA-aware. Several optimizations, important for practical implementations, as well as comprehensive experiments on two current NUMA platforms, are then reported and discussed. The experiments show the good scalability of the introduced algorithms and especially, the great improvements of NUMA-aware pS5 with real-world input sets on modern machines

Exploring a string-like landscape

We explore inflationary trajectories within randomly-generated two-dimensional potentials, considered as a toy model of the string landscape. Both the background and perturbation equations are solved numerically, the latter using the two-field formalism of Peterson and Tegmark which fully incorporates the effect of isocurvature perturbations. Sufficient inflation is a rare event, occurring for only roughly one in $10^5$ potentials. For models generating sufficient inflation, we find that the majority of runs satisfy current constraints from WMAP. The scalar spectral index is less than 1 in all runs. The tensor-to-scalar ratio is below the current limit, while typically large enough to be detected by next-generation CMB experiments and perhaps also by Planck. In many cases the inflationary consistency equation is broken by the effect of isocurvature modes.Comment: 24 pages with 8 figures incorporated, matches version accepted by JCA