An Efficient General In-Place Parallel Sorting Scheme

We present a simple and general parallel sorting scheme, ZZ-sort, which can be used to derive a class of efficient in-place sorting algorithms on realistic parallel machine models. We prove a tight bound for the worst case performance of ZZ-sort. We also demonstrate the average performance of ZZ-sort by experimental results obtained on a MasPar parallel computer. Our experiments indicate that ZZ-sort can be incorporated into a distributed memory parallel computer system as a standard routine, and this routine is useful for space critical situations. Finally, we show that ZZ-sort can be used to convert a non-adaptive parallel sorting algorithm into an in-place and adaptive one by considering the problem of sorting an arbitrarily large input on fixed-size reconfigurable meshes.