The influence of caches on the performance of sorting

Conference · Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 1997

OSTI ID:471693

LaMarca, A; Ladner, R E ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)

We investigate the effect that caches have on the performance of sorting algorithms both experimentally and analytically. To address the performance problems that high cache miss penalties introduce we restructure heapsort, mergesort and quicksort in order to improve their cache locality. For all three algorithms the improvement in cache performance leads to a reduction in total execution time. We also investigate the performance of radix sort. Despite the extremely low instruction count incurred by this linear sorting algorithm, its relatively poor cache performance results in worse overall performance than the efficient comparison based sorting algorithms.

• OSTI ID: 471693
• Report Number(s): CONF-970142-; TRN: 97:001377-0042
• Resource Relation: Conference: 8. annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) symposium on discrete algorithms, New Orleans, LA (United States), 5-7 Jan 1997; Other Information: PBD: 1997; Related Information: Is Part Of Proceedings of the eighth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on discrete algorithms; PB: 798 p.
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 MATHEMATICS
COMPUTERS
INFORMATION SCIENCE
MANAGEMENT
LAW
MISCELLANEOUS
MEMORY DEVICES
SORTING
ALGORITHMS
PERFORMANCE
MEMORY MANAGEMENT