Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sorting Algorithm Breaks Giga-Sort Barrier, With GPUs

Posted by timothy on from the quick-like-double-time dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the University of Virginia have recently open sourced an algorithm capable of sorting at a rate of one billion (integer) keys per second using a GPU. Although GPUs are often assumed to be poorly suited for algorithms like sorting, their results are several times faster than the best known CPU-based sorting implementations."

2 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Not a barrier by Captain+Segfault · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This isn't a "barrier" like the "sound barrier". There are no special difficulties that start around 1G/sec! It's just a threshold.

    Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying this isn't impressive, but no "barrier" was broken here!

  2. Um... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Algorithms aren't measured in "x per second"... only implementations are measured that way. The speed of an algorithm is described in big-O notation, such as O(n log n). The metric of "sorted keys per second" is largely useless, because it depends on the particular hardware setup.