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Shared Memory, Message Passing, And Hybrid Merge Sorts For Standalone And Clustered Smps, Atanas Radenski

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While merge sort is well-understood in parallel algorithms theory, relatively little is known of how to implement parallel merge sort with mainstream parallel programming platforms, such as OpenMP and MPI, and run it on mainstream SMP-based systems, such as multi-core computers and multi-core clusters. This is misfortunate because merge sort is not only a fast and stable sort algorithm, but it is also an easy to understand and popular representative of the rich class of divide-and-conquer methods; hence better understanding of merge sort parallelization can contribute to better understanding of divide-and-conquer parallelization in general. In this paper, we investigate three …