Analysing the cache behaviour of non-uniform distribution sorting algorithms

Abstract

We analyse the average-case cache performance of distribution sorting algorithms in the case when keys are independently but not uniformly distributed. We use this analysis to tune the performance of the integer sorting algorithm MSB radix sort when it is used to sort independent uniform floating-point numbers (floats). Our tuned MSB radix sort algorithm comfortably outperforms a cache-tuned implementation of bucketsort [11] when sorting uniform floats from [0,1).