AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort

Summary: AlphaSort is a cache-sensitive, memory-intensive sort for commodity hardware that completes the industry-standard sort benchmark in seven seconds, beating a 32-CPU Hypercube by 8:1. It uses file striping for disk bandwidth, QuickSort-based run generation, replacement-selection merges, and shared-memory multiprocessing; and introduces MinuteSort and DollarSort as startup-time benchmarks. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2729
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1994
Pagerank: 0.00053866006
Overall Rank: 84 | 99.42%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 15 of 15 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
67	The Merge/Purge Problem for Large Databases	1995	SIGMOD	0.00061348205
81	Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing	1994	VLDB	0.00055548574
124	DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?	1999	VLDB	0.00045103515
236	High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations	1997	SIGMOD	0.00031779642
238	Cache Conscious Indexing for Decision-Support in Main Memory	1999	VLDB	0.00031642425
239	GPUTeraSort: High Performance Graphics Co-processor Sorting for Large Database Management	2006	SIGMOD	0.00031617428
351	Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs	2009	VLDB	0.0002636504
531	Improving Index Performance through Prefetching	2001	SIGMOD	0.00020790058
1,124	Improving the Performance of List Intersection	2009	VLDB	0.00013847565
1,354	Managing Intra-operator Parallelism in Parallel Database Systems	1995	VLDB	0.00012408166
2,094	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB	9.5547223e-05
2,414	A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors	1996	SIGMOD	8.8659979e-05
3,498	Cubetree: Organization of and Bulk Incremental Updates on the Data Cube	1997	SIGMOD	7.0389539e-05
4,832	Dynamic Memory Adjustment for External Mergesort	1997	VLDB	5.8924168e-05
9,123	External Merge Sort for Top-K Queries: Eager input filtering guided by histograms	2020	SIGMOD	4.3920263e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
198	A Low Communication Sort Algorithm for a Parallel Database Machine	1989	VLDB	0.0003516098

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2,666	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD	8.3422378e-05
3,151	A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs	2017	SIGMOD	7.4720668e-05
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2,414	A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors	1996	SIGMOD	8.8659979e-05