Data Sorting Using Graphics Processing Units

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been increasingly used for general-purpose computation in recent years. The GPU accelerated applications are found in both scientific and commercial domains. Sorting is considered as one of the very important operations in many applications, so its efficient implementation is essential for the overall application performance. This paper represents an effort to analyze and evaluate the implementations of the representative sorting algorithms on the graphics processing units. Three sorting algorithms (Quicksort, Merge sort, and Radix sort) were evaluated on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) platform that is used to execute applications on NVIDIA graphics processing units. Algorithms were tested and evaluated using an automated test environment with input datasets of different characteristics. Finally, the results of this analysis are briefly discussed.