Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU

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)."

Comments

Re:What about other sorts?

[agurkan]

Actually P~2*Q. Also, there are tweaks to Quicksort which guarantees O(nlogn) behaviour. If you need an efficient but somewhat general purpose quicksort I strongly recommend Jörg Schön's collection of C programs which include a simple include file that creates a very efficient sortinf routine, and coding takes seconds!!