Encyclopedia of Algorithms

Living Edition
| Editors: Ming-Yang Kao

Cache-Oblivious Sorting

Living reference work entry
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27848-8_63-2
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Problem Definition

Sorting a set of elements is one of the most well-studied computational problems. In the cache-oblivious setting, the first study of sorting was presented in 1999 in the seminal paper by Frigo et al. [8] that introduced the cache-oblivious framework for developing algorithms aimed at machines with (unknown) hierarchical memory.

Model

In the cache-oblivious setting, the computational model is a machine with two levels of memory: a cache of limited capacity and a secondary memory of infinite capacity. The capacity of the cache is assumed to be M elements, and data is moved between the two levels of memory in blocks of Bconsecutive elements. Computations can only be performed on elements stored in cache, i.e., elements from secondary memory need to be moved to the cache before operations can access the elements. Programs are written as acting directly on one unbounded memory, i.e., programs are like standard RAM programs. The necessary block transfers between cache...

Keywords

Funnelsort 
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Recommended Reading

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    Frigo M, Leiserson CE, Prokop H, Ramachandran S (1999) Cache-oblivious algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 40th annual symposium on foundations of computer science. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, pp 285–297Google Scholar
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of AarhusÅrhusDenmark