A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors

Summary: A super-scalar sort for RISC CPUs; eliminates most comparisons, exploits multi-unit parallelism, reduces key passes, and improves data locality. RS/6000 implementation; strong I/O overlap yields 0.6s CPU for 1M 10-byte keys, 5.1s for 100 MB, large price/performance gains over traditional sorts. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 2949
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1996
Pagerank: 7.4473906e-05
Overall Rank: 3,396 | 76.71%
DOI: 10.1145/233269.233336

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Ramesh C. Agarwal (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{agarwal_sigmod96,
        title = {{A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors}},
        author = {Agarwal, Ramesh C.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '96},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/233269.233336},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/233269.233336},
        year = {1996}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
305	GPUTeraSort: High Performance Graphics Co-processor Sorting for Large Database Management	2006	SIGMOD	0.00021872796
826	High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations	1997	SIGMOD	0.0001377339
1,880	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB	9.5562066e-05
4,021	PARADIS: An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for In-place Radix Sort	2015	VLDB	6.9501893e-05
5,216	Fast and Approximate Stream Mining of Quantiles and Frequencies Using Graphics Processors	2005	SIGMOD	6.3121293e-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
215	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.00024507963

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10	215	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD