DIAPRISM Hardware Sorter — Sort a Million Records Within a Second —
Shinsuke Azuma, Takao Sakuma, Tetsuya Takeo, Takaaki ANDO, Kenji Shirai · 2000
Mitsubishi Electric Corp. has released the DIAPRISM hardware sorter for OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) and data warehouse applications. It enables high-speed sorting on a commercial PC server. The sorter employs a pipeline merge sort algorithm. It consists of multiple sort processors connected linearly and necessary amount of memory for each processor. The architecture of the sort processor is capable of sorting 4GB of data at one time. The sorter has achieved Datamation benchmark record, sorting a million 100-byte records in 0.998 second.