Segmented sort, as a generalization of classical sort, orders a batch of independent segments in a whole array. Along with the wider adoption of manycore processors for HPC and big data applications, segmented sort plays an increasingly important role than sort. In this paper, we present an adaptive segmented sort mechanism on GPUs. Our mechanisms include two core techniques: (1) a differentiated method for dierent segment lengths to eliminate the irregularity caused by various workloads and thread divergence; and (2) a register-based sort method to support N -to-M data-thread binding and in-register data communication. We also implement a shared memory-based merge method to support non-uniform length chunk merge via multiple warps. Our segmented sort mechanism shows great improvements over the methods from CUB, CUSP and ModernGPU on NVIDIA K80-Kepler and TitanX-Pascal GPUs. Furthermore, we apply our mechanism on two applications, i.e., sux array construction and sparse matrix-matrix multiplication, and obtain obvious gains over state-of-the-art implementations.
Hou et al. REF implemented a register-based sort method shows great improvements over scratchpad memory methods on NVIDIA K80-Kepler and TitanX-Pascal GPUs.
Fast segmented sort on GPUs
ICS '17
Computer Science