A PRACTICAL ALGORITHM for INTEGER SORTING INTEGER SORTING ON A MESH-CONNECTED COMPUTER*
N. Folwell, Sumanta Guha, Ichiro Suzuki · International Journal of Parallel Emergent and Distributed Systems · 1997
This paper presents count-sort, a parallel algorithm for mesh-connected computers to sort integers where the range of inputs is known. A straightforward counting technique that has not been implemented previously in parallel sorting algorithms is presented. On a mesh-connected computer with N×N processors we are able to sort N integers in the range 1 sN in timewhere cN is very small. For practical values of N, the algorithm is extremely fast. Further, it is possible to expand the range by a factor k to 1 N so that the slowdown is less than k. We produce two implementations of count-sort on the SIMD MasPar MP-I with 8192 processors. The first sorts 8-bit integers, one per processor, significantly faster than the manufacturer's current library routine for sorting 8-bit integers. The second implementation is a fast version that sorts several elements per processor.