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 open source 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 four Intel hexad-core processors (i.e. twenty four processor cores). The experimental results show that our "psort" is approximately 11 times faster than standard "qsort" using 24 processors.