FASTSORT: AN EXTERNAL SORT USING PARALLEL PROCESSING

FastSort is an external sort that uses parallel processing, large main memories and parallel disc accesses to obtain high performance. FastSort can sort a file as quickly as it can read the input and it can produce the result as quickly as it can write the target file -that is it sorts in linear time rather than the traditional Nlog(N) time of serial sort systems. This paper describes the design and implementation of FastSort. It presents performance measurements of FastSort on various Tandem Nonstop processors, with particular emphasis on the speedup obtained by using parallelism to sort large files.