Fast parallel sorting algorithms on GPUs

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the three widely used parallel sorting algorithms: Odd-Even sort, Rank sort and Bitonic sort in terms of sorting rate, sorting time and speed-up on CPU and different GPU architectures. Alongside we have implemented novel parallel algorithm: min-max butterfly network, for finding minimum and maximum in large data sets. All algorithms have been implemented exploiting data parallelism model, for achieving high performance, as available on multi-core GPUs using the OpenCL specification. Our results depicts minimum speed-up19x of bitonic sort against odd-even sorting technique for small queue sizes on CPU and maximum of 2300x speed-up for very large queue sizes on Nvidia Quadro 6000 GPU architecture. Our implementation of full-butterfly network sorting results in relatively better performance than all of the three sorting techniques: bitonic, odd-even and rank sort. For min-max butterfly network, our findings report high speed-up of Nvidia quadro 6000 GPU for high data set size reaching 2^24 with much lower sorting time.