String sorting on multi and many-threaded architectures: A comparative study

Abstract

The increase in the amount of data is evident in recent times. The amount of data stored and retrieved is increasing at a fast rate. Processing text data consumes large amount of memory in terms of storage and extraction. Sorting the stored data is one of the most favorable methods that can be used in order to increase the efficiency of extracting stored data. Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) have evolved from being used as dedicated graphic rendering modules to being used to exploit fast parallelism for large computational purposes. The use of GPUs for sorting strings large in size has produced effective and fast results when compared to using CPUs. This paper produces a comparative study on the most popular and efficient string sorting algorithms that have been implemented on CPU and GPU machines. This paper also proposes an efficient parallel multi-key quicksort implementation which uses ternary search tree in order to increase the speed up and efficiency of sorting large set of string data.