In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Information Systmes , 1991. Comparing exact and probabilistic splitting for external sorting on a database. Model and experimental results from Gamma machine. All elements received are written to disks as small sorted runs. Then each process mergesorts its runs.
Probabilistic split uses only a sample of the elements to define the vector.
Parallel External Sorting in Volcano . W. Hightower, J. Prins, and J. Reif. Implementations of Randomized Sorting on Large Parallel Machines . In Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures , June 1992. Both utilize a sophisticated randomized sampling technique to form a splitter set, but Samplesort distributes the splitter set to each processor while Flashsort uses splitter-directed routing.