Array sort: an adaptive sorting algorithm on multi‐thread

Abstract

Sorting is the most fundamental operation in database system. There are many classical sorting algorithms and among them the most commonly-used sorting algorithm in modern database system is merge sort. Merge sort is an efficient, general-purpose, comparison-based sorting algorithm. As merge sort is based on a divide and conquer model, it has found wide use in parallel computing algorithms. In this study, the authors present an adaptive sorting algorithm based on merge sort which is called array sort. Array sort not only takes advantages of merge sort, but also simplify the merge step by using a tag array. The proposed implementation consists of three phases: tag array creation phase, tag array split phase and list merge phase. Instead of just evaluating array sort in a single thread environment, the authors also run their experiments on multi-thread to test how array sort performs.