We present WiscSort, a new approach to high-performance concurrent sorting
for existing and future byte-addressable storage (BAS) devices. WiscSort
carefully reduces writes, exploits random reads by splitting keys and values
during sorting, and performs interference-aware scheduling with thread pool
sizing to avoid I/O bandwidth degradation. We introduce the BRAID model which
encompasses the unique characteristics of BAS devices. Many state-of-the-art
sorting systems do not comply with the BRAID model and deliver sub-optimal
performance, whereas WiscSort demonstrates the effectiveness of complying with
BRAID. We show that WiscSort is 2-7x faster than competing approaches on a
standard sort benchmark. We evaluate the effectiveness of key-value separation
on different key-value sizes and compare our concurrency optimizations with
various other concurrency models. Finally, we emulate generic BAS devices and
show how our techniques perform well with various combinations of hardware
properties
