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Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU

Posted by timothy on from the but-that's-for-graphics dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before (previous Slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparently, the above implementation is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)."

2 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Not accurate by Have+Blue · · Score: 4, Informative

    the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline

    For the past two generations or so (starting with the Radeon 9800), there has been no such thing as "the default high speed rendering pipeline". The only circuitry present in the chip has been for evaluating shaders, and the fixed-function pipeline has been implemented as "shaders" that the driver runs on the chip automatically.

    At least, I know for a fact this is true of ATI chips, and would not be at all surprised if nVidia is doing something similar.

  2. Re:What about other sorts? by Shisha · · Score: 4, Informative

    Presumably though the algorithm they used in GPUsort can be made to work on a Pentium IV.
    Yes, but the algorithm won't be anything special. It won't be a better algorithm than qsort and definitely not more efficient than O(n log n) comparisons. What is special is that it runs on a GPU.

    they should have compared GPUsort on the CPU as well

    And how exactly were they supposed to do that?!? GPUsort has been programmed to run on a GPU, and even if you don't know the first thing about computers, the G should suggest that GPU is very different from a CPU.

    One can prove that no sorting algorithm using binary comparisons can do better than use O(n log n) comparisons. Hence GPUsort couldn't have been asymptotically more efficient that qsort.

    If you think about it, the standart qsort implementation is definitely more optimised than most algorithms out there; it has been around for very long. But none of this matters; GPUsort can't run on a CPU.