A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using commodity processors, memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industry-standard sort benchmark in seven seconds. This beats the best published record on a 32-CPU 32-disk Hypercube by 8:1. On another benchmark, AlphaSort sorted more than a gigabyte in a minute. AlphaSort is a

In December 1998, a 488 node IBM RS/6000 SP * sorted a terabyte of data (10 billion 100 byte records) in 17 minutes, 37 seconds. This is more than 2.5 times faster than the previous record for a problem of this magnitude. The SPsort program itself was custom-designed for this benchmark, but the cluster, its interconnection hardware, disk subsystem, operating system, file system, communication library, and job management software are all IBM products. The system sustained an aggregate data rate of 2.8 GB/s from more than 6 TB of disks managed by the GPFS global shared file system during the sort. Simultaneous with these transfers, 1.9 GB/s of local disk I/O and 5.6 GB/s of interprocessor communication were also sustained. Introduction The speed of sorting has long been used as a measure of computer systems I/O and communication performance. In 1985, an article in Datamation magazine proposed a sort of one million records of 100 bytes each, with random 10 bytes keys, as a useful measu...

The Tandem NonStop is a loosely-coupled multi-computer system managed by Guardian 90, a message-based distributed operating system designed to provide an environment for online transaction processing. One of the benefits of a loosely-coupled architecture is its inherently distributed character. A distributed architecture allows many components to be applied scalably in parallel to a large data-intensive task, such as batch or query processing, or to many small independent tasks, such as online transaction processing. However, achieving good performance in a loosely-coupled architecture presents some challenges relative to a tightly-coupled architecture. These challenges include: • Overcoming the high cost of inter-process communication. • Performing load-balancing without shared memory. • Solving the client-server priority inversion problem. Overcoming these challenges has required complex performance-oriented optimizations in Guardian. These optimizations- aimed at reducing message traffic, avoiding software

: NTsort is an external sort on WindowsNT 5.0. It has minimal functionality but excellent price performance. In particular, running on mail-order hardware it can sort 1.5 GB for a penny. NT5.0 is not yet available. For commercially available sorts, Postman Sort from Robert Ramey Software Development has elapsed time performance comparable to NTsort, while using less processor time. It can sort 1.27 GB for a penny (12.7 million records.) These sorts set new price-performance records. This paper documents this and proposes that the PennySort benchmark be revised to Performance/Price sort: a simple GB/$ sort metric based on a two-pass external sort. Why does anyone care about sorting and sort performance? The prosaic reason is that sorting is a common task -- it is frequently used in database systems, data analysis, and data mining. Another important reason is that sorting is a simple balanced workload, involving memory access, IO, and cpu. It evaluates a computer system's overall perfor...