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A comparison-free sorting algorithm on CPUs and GPUs

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Abstract

This paper presents a new sorting algorithm that sorts input data elements without any comparison operations between the data—comparison-free sorting. Our algorithm’s time complexity is on the order of O(N) for both single- and multi-threaded CPU and many-core GPU implementations. Our results show speedups on average of 4.6 × , 4 × , and 3.5 × for single-threaded CPU, 8-threaded CPU, and many-threaded GPU implementations, respectively, for input sizes ranging from 27 to 230 elements as compared to common sorting algorithms for a wide variation of element distributions, ranging from all unique elements to a single repeated element. In addition, our proposed algorithm more efficiently utilizes the GPU architecture as compared to a multi-core CPU architecture, showing a speedup of approximately 4 × for input sizes ranging from 27 to 230 elements.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of National Science Foundation (CNS-0953447 and CNS-1718033) and Jordan University of Science and Technology for both providing the financial support to complete this work. The authors would like also to thank the computing center of Synchrotron Light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) for providing the GPU platform resources for our simulations. Sincere thanks are given to Computing Engineers Mustafa A. Alzu’bi and Salman Matalgah for their continuous help in maintaining the GPU resources at the center and providing us with unrestricted access.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, 22110, Jordan

    Saleh Abdel-hafeez & Samer Abubaker

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Ann Gordon-Ross

  3. NSF Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC), University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, USA

    Ann Gordon-Ross

Authors
  1. Saleh Abdel-hafeez
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  2. Ann Gordon-Ross
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  3. Samer Abubaker
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Correspondence to Saleh Abdel-hafeez.

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Abdel-hafeez, S., Gordon-Ross, A. & Abubaker, S. A comparison-free sorting algorithm on CPUs and GPUs. J Supercomput 74, 6369–6400 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2567-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2567-3

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