Performance Evaluation of Parallel Sortings on the Supercomputer Fugaku

Abstract

Sorting is one of the most basic algorithms, and developing highly parallel sorting programs is becoming increasingly important in high-performance computing because the number of CPU cores per node in modern supercomputers tends to increase. In this study, we have implemented two multi-threaded sorting algorithms based on samplesort and compared their performance on the supercomputer Fugaku. The first algorithm divides an input sequence into multiple blocks, sorts each block, and then selects pivots by sampling from each block at regular intervals. Each block is then partitioned using the pivots, and partitions in different blocks are merged into a single sorted sequence. The second algorithm differs from the first one in only selecting pivots, where the binary search is used to select pivots such that the number of elements in each partition is equal. We compare the performance of the two algorithms with different sequential sorting and multiway merging algorithms. We demonstrate that the second algorithm with BlockQuicksort (a quicksort accelerated by reducing conditional branches) for sequential sorting and the selection tree for merging shows consistently high speed and high parallel efficiency for various input data types and data sizes.