High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations

Summary: NOW-Sort runs parallel sorting on a Network of Workstations; on 64 nodes it sorts 6.0 GB in under a minute. Commodity OS/hardware suffice; bottlenecks are I/O bandwidth, while NOWs offer incremental scalability and a data-intensive, shared-nothing DB platform. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 3012
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 1997
Pagerank: 0.0001377339
Overall Rank: 826 | 94.34%
DOI: 10.1145/253260.253322

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau (University of California Berkeley)
2. Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau (University of California Berkeley)
3. David E. Culler (University of California Berkeley)
4. Joseph M. Hellerstein (University of California Berkeley)
5. David A. Patterson (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{arpacidusseau_sigmod97,
        title = {{High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations}},
        author = {Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea C. and Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. and Culler, David E. and Hellerstein, Joseph M. and Patterson, David A.},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '97},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/253260.253322},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/253260.253322},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
53	Eddies: Continuously Adaptive Query Processing	2000	SIGMOD	0.00041071971
72	Map-Reduce-Merge: Simplified Relational Data Processing on Large Clusters	2007	SIGMOD	0.00037695852
109	DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?	1999	VLDB	0.000331207
305	GPUTeraSort: High Performance Graphics Co-processor Sorting for Large Database Management	2006	SIGMOD	0.00021872796
1,880	Scalable Sweeping-Based Spatial Join	1998	VLDB	9.5562066e-05
2,426	Active Storage For Large-Scale Data Mining and Multimedia	1998	VLDB	8.5987569e-05
3,368	CloudRAMSort: Fast and Efficient Large-Scale Distributed RAM Sort on Shared-Nothing Cluster	2012	SIGMOD	7.4713287e-05
7,191	WiscSort: External Sorting For Byte-Addressable Storage	2023	VLDB	5.6772818e-05
12,524	Adaptively Parallelizing Distributed Range Queries	2009	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 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
951	A Benchmark of NonStop SQL on the Debit Credit Transaction	1988	SIGMOD	0.00013021781
2,444	An Overview of DB2 Parallel Edition	1995	SIGMOD	8.5743744e-05
3,396	A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors	1996	SIGMOD	7.4473906e-05
3,842	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD	7.0803078e-05
6,158	Informix Online XPS	1995	SIGMOD	5.9544728e-05

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