Hardware acceleration of divide-and-conquer paradigms: a case study

The authors describe a method for speeding up divide-and-conquer algorithms with a hardware coprocessor, using sorting as an example. The method employs a conventional processor for the 'divide' and 'merge' phases, while the 'conquer' phase is handled by a purpose-built coprocessor. It is shown how transformation techniques from the Ruby language can be adopted in developing a family of systolic sorters, and how one of the resulting designs is prototyped in eight FPGAs on a PC coprocessor board known as CHS2*4 from Algotronix. The execution of the hardware unit is embedded in a sorting program, with the PC host merging the sorted sequences from the hardware sorter. The performance of this implementation is compared against various sorting algorithms on a number of PC systems.<>