Bitonic Sort on the Connection Machine

ABSTRACT This paper presents three versions of bitonic sort on the Connection Machine (Model CM-). The first' version is an adaptation of bitonic sort on a hypercube machine by Johnsson [3] to the CM-2 by configuring the CM-2 as a binary hypercube. The second version takes advantage of the bidireaional links that allow concurrent communications among nodes which yields about 30% improvement over the first version. In the third version, we take advantage of the Connection Machine's grid feature—“NEWS” function; thus, decreasing the hypercube communications among processors and giving overall better performance than both previous versions. For all methods, the time complexity of the algorithms is O(log2 2(n))- A brief description of the CM-2 and certain functions of the ∗lisp language are also discussed.