Kepler GPU accelerated recursive sorting using dynamic parallelism

Abstract

SummaryThis paper focuses on the performance gain obtained on the Kepler graphics processing units (GPUs) for multi‐key quicksort. Because multi‐key quicksort is a recursive‐based algorithm, many of the researchers have found it tedious to parallelize the algorithm on the multi and many core architectures. A survey of the state‐of‐the‐art string sorting algorithms and a robust insight of the Kepler GPU architecture gave rise to an intriguing research idea of matching the template of multi‐key quicksort with the dynamic parallelism feature offered by the Kepler‐based GPU's. The CPU parallel implementation has an improvement of 33 to 50% and 62 to 75 improvement when compared with 8‐bit and 16‐bit parallel most significant digit radix sort, respectively. The GPU implementation of multi‐key quicksort gives 6× to 18× speed up compared with the CPU parallel implementation of parallel multi‐key quicksort. The GPU implementation of multi‐key quicksort achieves 1.5× to 3× speed up when compared with the GPU implementation of string sorting algorithm using singleton elements in the literature. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.