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How Branch Mispredictions Affect Quicksort

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Algorithms – ESA 2006 (ESA 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4168))

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Abstract

We explain the counterintuitive observation that finding “good” pivots (close to the median of the array to be partitioned) may not improve performance of quicksort. Indeed, an intentionally skewed pivot improves performance. The reason is that while the instruction count decreases with the quality of the pivot, the likelihood that the direction of a branch is mispredicted also goes up. We analyze the effect of simple branch prediction schemes and measure the effects on real hardware.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Kanela Kaligosi

  2. Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

    Peter Sanders

Authors
  1. Kanela Kaligosi
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  2. Peter Sanders
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, USA and School of Computer Science, Tel-Aviv University, 69978, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Yossi Azar

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, University Road, LE1 7RH, Leicester, UK

    Thomas Erlebach

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kaligosi, K., Sanders, P. (2006). How Branch Mispredictions Affect Quicksort. In: Azar, Y., Erlebach, T. (eds) Algorithms – ESA 2006. ESA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4168. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11841036_69

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11841036_69

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-38875-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-38876-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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