Performance of the bitonic mergesort network on a Dataflow computer

High speed computing and growing amounts of data are driving the quest for ever faster sorting algorithms. Sorting networks executing parallel sorting and dataflow computational paradigm are offered as a possible solution. In presented experiments Bitonic mergesort algorithm is implemented on an entry model of the Maxeler dataflow supercomputing system. Our results show, that sorting of a small size arrays on Maxeler, comparing to the fastest sorting algorithm on a CPU, achieves the speedup factor of 16. Using more advanced Maxeler systems, we expect to be able to sort larger arrays and achieve greater speedups.