The Analysis and Design of Some New Sorting Machines

A classification method for parallel sorting architectures is presented for comparison of existing designs. Some common drawbacks of these parallel sorters are noted: in general, they are limited by their data accessing mechanism, their hardware utilization is low, and their sorting speed is in some sense independent of the number of sorting elements used in the architecture. In this paper we present a detailed design and analysis of distributor based sorters (parallel balanced tree sorters) which can sort lists whose size is proportional to the memory space available and whose speed is proportional to the number of sorting elements used.