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Summary: Searching for the Sorting Record: Experiences in Tuning NOW-Sort
Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau,
David E. Culler, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and David A. Patterson
Computer Science Division,
University of California, Berkeley
dusseau,remzi,culler,jmh,pattrsn¡ @cs.berkeley.edu
¢¤£¦¥¨§©¦§
We present our experiencesin developingand tuning theperfor-
mance of NOW-Sort, a parallel, disk-to-disk sorting algorithm.
NOW-Sort currently holds two world records in database-
industry standard benchmarks. Critical to the tuning process
wasthe setting of expectations,which tell the programmer both
where to tune and when to stop. We found three categories of
useful tools: tools that help set expectations and configure
the application to different hardware parameters, visualization
tools that animate performance counters, and search tools that
track down performance anomalies. All such tools must in-
teract well with all layers of the underlying software (e.g., the
operating system), as well as with applications that leverage
modern OS features, such as threads and memory-mapped I/O.
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