Sorting Data on Ultra-Large Scale with RADULS. New Incarnation of Radix Sort

Abstract

The paper introduces RADULS, a new parallel sorter based on radix sort algorithm, intended to organize ultra-large data sets efficiently. For example 4G 16-byte records can be sorted with 16 threads in less than 15 seconds on Intel Xeon-based workstation. The implementation of RADULS is not only highly optimized to gain such an excellent performance, but also parallelized in a cache friendly manner to make the most of modern multicore architectures. Besides, our parallel scheduler launches a few different procedures at runtime, according to the current parameters of the execution, for proper workload management. All experiments show RADULS to be superior to competing algorithms.