External Sorting and Permuting

Synonyms

Out-of-core sorting

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

1988; Aggarwal, Vitter

Problem Definition

Notations The main properties of magnetic disks and multiple disk systems can be captured by the commonly used parallel disk model (PDM), which is summarized below in its current form as developed by Vitter and Shriver [22]:

• N = problem size (in units of data items);

• M = internal memory size (in units of data items);

• B = block transfer size (in units of data items);

• D = number of independent disk drives;

• P = number of CPUs,

where M < N, and 1 ≤ DB ≤ M∕2. The data items are assumed to be of fixed length. In a single I/O, each of the D disks can simultaneously transfer a block of B contiguous data items. (In the original 1988 article [2], the D blocks per I/O were allowed to come from the same disk, which is not realistic.) If P ≤ D, each of the P processors can drive about D∕P disks; if D < P, each disk is shared by about P∕D processors. The internal memory size is M∕P...