An Efficient Parallel Sorting Compatible with the Standard qsort

Abstract

The main contribution of this paper is to present an efficient parallel sorting psort compatible with the standard qsort. Our parallel sorting psort is implemented such that its interface is compatible with qsort in C Standard Library. Therefore, any application program that uses standard qsort can be accelerated by simply replacing qsort call by our psort . Also, psort uses standard qsort as a subroutine for local sequential sorting. So, if the performance of qsort is improved by anyone in the community, then that of our psort is also automatically improved. To evaluate the performance of our psort, we have implemented our parallel sorting in a Linux server with two Intel quad-core processors (i. e. eight processor cores). The experimental results show that our psort is approximately 6 times faster than standard qsort using 8 processors. Since the speed up factor cannot be more than 8 if we use 8 cores, our algorithm is close to optimal. Also, as far as we know, no previously published parallel implementations achieve a speed up factor less than 4 using 8 cores.