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AlphaSort: a RISC machine sort

Authors:

Zarka Cvetanovic,

Dave LometAuthors Info & Claims

SIGMOD '94: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data

Pages 233 - 242

https://doi.org/10.1145/191839.191884

Published: 24 May 1994 Publication History

Abstract

A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using Alpha AXP processors, commodity memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industry-standard sort benchmark in seven seconds. This beats the best published record on a 32-cpu 32-disk Hypercube by 8:1. On another benchmark, AlphaSort sorted more than a gigabyte in a minute.

AlphaSort is a cache-sensitive memory-intensive sort algorithm. It uses file striping to get high disk bandwidth. It uses QuickSort to generate runs and uses replacement-selection to merge the runs. It uses shared memory multiprocessors to break the sort into subsort chores.

Because startup times are becoming a significant part of the total time, we propose two new benchmarks: (1) Minutesort: how much can you sort in a minute, and (2) DollarSort: how much can you sort for a dollar.

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AlphaSort: a RISC machine sort

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AlphaSort: a RISC machine sort

A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using Alpha AXP processors, commodity memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industry-standard sort benchmark ...
AlphaSort: a cache-sensitive parallel external sort

A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using commodity processors, memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industry-standard sort benchmark in seven ...
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Readings in database systems (3rd ed.)

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGMOD '94: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data

May 1994

525 pages

ISBN:0897916395

DOI:10.1145/191839

Editors:
Richard Thomas Snodgrass
Univ. of Arizona
,
Marianne Winslett
Univ. of Illinois

ACM SIGMOD Record Volume 23, Issue 2
June 1994
522 pages
ISSN:0163-5808
DOI:10.1145/191843
Editors:
Richard Thomas Snodgrass
Univ. of Arizona
,
Marianne Winslett
Univ. of Illinois
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1994 ACM.

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Published: 24 May 1994

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SIGMOD/PODS94: Joint ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data and ACM SIGMOD & ACM Symposium Principles of Database Systems

May 24 - 27, 1994

Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503222.3507711
Chen SLiang YYang M(2022)KVSTL: An Application Support to LSM-Tree Based Key-Value Store via Shingled Translation Layer Data ManagementIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2021.309896171:7(1598-1611)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2021.3098961
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3332466.3374547
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Dusso PSauer CHärder T(2015)Optimizing Sort in Hadoop Using Replacement SelectionAdvances in Databases and Information Systems10.1007/978-3-319-23135-8_25(365-379)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2015
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