%T Fast Out-of-Core Sorting on Parallel Disk Systems
%A Matthew D. Pearson
%R Technical Report PCS-TR99-351
%I Dartmouth College, Computer Science
%C Hanover, NH
%D June 1999
%U http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR99-351.ps.Z
%X
 This paper discusses our implementation of Rajasekaran's
 (l,m)-mergesort algorithm (LMM) for sorting on parallel disks. LMM is
 asymptotically optimal for large problems and has the additional
 advantage of a low constant in its I/O complexity. Our implementation
 is written in C using the ViC* I/O API for parallel disk systems. 
 	We compare the performance of LMM to that of the C library
 function qsort on a DEC Alpha server. qsort makes a good benchmark
 because it is fast and performs comparatively well under demand
 paging. Since qsort fails when the swap disk fills up, we can only
 compare these algorithms on a limited range of inputs. Still, on most
 out-of-core problems, our implementation of LMM runs between 1.5 and
 1.9 times faster than qsort, with the gap widening with increasing
 problem size. 
%Z
 Undergraduate Honors Thesis.  Advisor: Tom Cormen.