Back to index

AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort

Chris Nyberg, Tom Barclar, Zarka Cvetanovic, Jim Gray, Dave Lomet

Summary by: Steve Gribble and Armando Fox

One-line summary: AlphaSort is a DataMation sort winner that optimizes the memory hierarchy (stays on the processor cache as much as possible) and uses file striping across disks to eliminate the reading-in and writing-out phase overheads of the sort; MinuteSort and DollarSort are recommended.

Overview/Main Points

Relevance

Somewhat relevant - metric/benchmark for sorting. Mostly a competition to see who can do coolest optimization hacks. Dollarsort/minutesort are clearly more reasonable than Datamation sort.

Flaws


Back to index