Parallel Multi-Deque Partition Dual-Deque Merge sorting algorithm using OpenMP

Abstract

Quicksort is an important algorithm that uses the divide and conquer concept, and it can be run to solve any problem. The performance of the algorithm can be improved by implementing this algorithm in parallel. In this paper, the parallel sorting algorithm named the Multi-Deque Partition Dual-Deque Merge Sorting algorithm (MPDMSort) is proposed and run on a shared memory system. This algorithm contains the Multi-Deque Partitioning phase, which is a block-based parallel partitioning algorithm, and the Dual-Deque Merging phase, which is a merging algorithm without compare-and-swap operations and sorts the small data with the sorting function of the standard template library. The OpenMP library, which is an application programming interface used to develop the parallel implementation of this algorithm, is implemented in MPDMSort. Two computers (one with an Intel Xeon Gold 6142 CPU and the other with an Intel Core i7-11700 CPU) running Ubuntu Linux are used in this experiment. The results show that MPDMSort is faster than parallel balanced quicksort and multiway merge sort on the large random distribution data. A speedup of 13.81$$\times$$ × and speedup per thread of 0.86 can be obtained. Thus, developers can use these parallel partitioning and merging algorithms to improve the performance of related algorithms.