GPUTeraSort: High Performance Graphics Co-processor Sorting for Large Database Management

Summary: GPUTeraSort exploits GPU data- and task-parallelism to sort billion-record wide-key data, while the CPU handles I/O and resource management. A two-phase pipeline: read/build/sort/run/write and read/merge/write overlaps I/O with GPU sort, delivering near-peak I/O, higher bandwidth, and PennySort-level price-performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h307db4ec386f5b1b
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2006
Pagerank: 0.00021598803
Overall Rank: 304 | 97.96%
DOI: 10.1145/1142473.1142511

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Naga K. Govindaraju (University of North Carolina)
2. Jim Gray (Microsoft)
3. Ritesh Kumar (University of North Carolina)
4. Dinesh Manocha (University of North Carolina)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{govindaraju_sigmod06,
        title = {{GPUTeraSort: High Performance Graphics Co-processor Sorting for Large Database Management}},
        author = {Govindaraju, Naga K. and Gray, Jim and Kumar, Ritesh and Manocha, Dinesh},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '06},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1142473.1142511},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1142473.1142511},
        year = {2006}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 40 of 40 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
210	Sort vs. Hash Revisited: Fast Join Implementation on Modern Multi-Core CPUs	2009	VLDB	0.00024844328
616	Relational Joins on Graphics Processors	2008	SIGMOD	0.00015554627
663	Fast Sort on CPUs and GPUs: A Case for Bandwidth Oblivious SIMD Sort	2010	SIGMOD	0.00014997516
723	Efficient Implementation of Sorting on Multi-Core SIMD CPU Architecture	2008	VLDB	0.00014507399
775	The Yin and Yang of Processing Data Warehousing Queries on GPU Devices	2013	VLDB	0.0001407924
857	Hardware-Oblivious Parallelism for In-Memory Column-Stores	2013	VLDB	0.00013422539
941	Data Processing on FPGAs	2009	VLDB	0.00012951355
1,269	A Study of the Fundamental Performance Characteristics of GPUs and CPUs for Database Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011254742
1,542	HippogriffDB: Balancing I/O and GPU Bandwidth in Big Data Analytics	2016	VLDB	0.0001030858
1,779	Ibex—An Intelligent Storage Engine with Support for Advanced SQL Off-loading	2014	VLDB	9.6575635e-05
2,161	CellSort: High Performance Sorting on the Cell Processor	2007	VLDB	8.9349355e-05
2,187	Database Compression on Graphics Processors	2010	VLDB	8.891124e-05
2,220	Streams on Wires — A Query Compiler for FPGAs	2009	VLDB	8.8116311e-05
2,466	Concurrent Analytical Query Processing with GPUs	2014	VLDB	8.4182778e-05
2,487	A Memory Bandwidth-Efficient Hybrid Radix Sort on GPUs	2017	SIGMOD	8.3939994e-05
2,694	Executing Stream Joins on the Cell Processor	2007	VLDB	8.1197353e-05
2,889	High-Throughput Transaction Executions on Graphics Processors	2011	VLDB	7.9034864e-05
3,108	SABER: Window-Based Hybrid Stream Processing for Heterogeneous Architectures	2016	SIGMOD	7.6392673e-05
3,202	Why it is time for a HyPE: A Hybrid Query Processing Engine for Efficient GPU Coprocessing in DBMS	2013	VLDB	7.5401819e-05
3,296	Lightning Fast and Space Efficient Inequality Joins	2015	VLDB	7.444648e-05
3,374	A Hybrid B+-tree as Solution for In-Memory Indexing on CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Computing Platforms	2016	SIGMOD	7.3606793e-05
3,491	In-Cache Query Co-Processing on Coupled CPU-GPU Architectures	2015	VLDB	7.2586387e-05
3,575	JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark	2007	SIGMOD	7.1927277e-05
3,657	Tile-based Lightweight Integer Compression in GPU	2022	SIGMOD	7.1227107e-05
3,888	Orchestrating Data Placement and Query Execution in Heterogeneous CPU-GPU DBMS	2022	VLDB	6.942437e-05
3,974	TCUDB: Accelerating Database with Tensor Processors	2022	SIGMOD	6.8848857e-05
4,065	PARADIS: An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for In-place Radix Sort	2015	VLDB	6.8199976e-05
4,225	SIMD- and Cache-Friendly Algorithm for Sorting an Array of Structures	2015	VLDB	6.7180565e-05
5,400	Towards a Hybrid Design for Fast Query Processing in DB2 with BLU Acceleration Using Graphical Processing Units: A Technology Demonstration	2016	SIGMOD	6.1468677e-05
5,593	Datalog and Emerging Applications: An Interactive Tutorial	2011	SIGMOD	6.0707344e-05
6,156	FPGA: What's in it for a Database?	2009	SIGMOD	5.8659742e-05
7,068	Efficient Top-K Query Processing on Massively Parallel Hardware	2018	SIGMOD	5.6060783e-05
7,172	Automatic Synthesis of Out-of-Core Algorithms	2013	SIGMOD	5.5918806e-05
7,190	GPUQP: Query Co-Processing Using Graphics Processors	2007	SIGMOD	5.5881603e-05
7,455	Modularis: Modular Relational Analytics over Heterogeneous Distributed Platforms	2021	VLDB	5.5210654e-05
8,602	A Case for Graphics-driven Query Processing	2023	VLDB	5.3037284e-05
8,628	Accelerating Pathology Image Data Cross-Comparison on CPU-GPU Hybrid Systems	2012	VLDB	5.2991344e-05
8,813	Deploying Computational Storage for HTAP DBMSs Takes More Than Just Computation Offloading	2023	VLDB	5.270772e-05
11,573	Accelerating Merkle Patricia Trie with GPU	2024	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,334	A Study of Sorting Algorithms on Approximate Memory	2016	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
27	Database Architecture Optimized for the New Bottleneck: Memory Access	1999	VLDB	0.00051576613
48	Weaving Relations for Cache Performance	2001	VLDB	0.00043795812
76	Cache Conscious Algorithms for Relational Query Processing	1994	VLDB	0.00036891569
110	DBMSs On A Modern Processor: Where Does Time Go?	1999	VLDB	0.00032696785
206	Cache Conscious Indexing for Decision-Support in Main Memory	1999	VLDB	0.00024981343
223	AlphaSort: A RISC Machine Sort	1994	SIGMOD	0.00024120979
287	Implementing Database Operations Using SIMD Instructions	2002	SIGMOD	0.00022001327
761	Conjunctive Selection Conditions in Main Memory	2002	PODS	0.00014138079
847	High-Performance Sorting on Networks of Workstations	1997	SIGMOD	0.00013517696
997	What happens during a Join? Dissecting CPU and Memory Optimization Effects	2000	VLDB	0.00012628913
1,041	Generic Database Cost Models for Hierarchical Memory Systems	2002	VLDB	0.00012354465
1,454	Fast Computation of Database Operations using Graphics Processors	2004	SIGMOD	0.00010596726
2,321	Hardware Acceleration for Spatial Selections and Joins	2003	SIGMOD	8.6421843e-05
2,749	Hardware Acceleration in Commercial Databases: A Case Study of Spatial Operations	2004	VLDB	8.0571049e-05
2,917	Database Architectures for New Hardware	2004	VLDB	7.8547895e-05
3,448	A Super Scalar Sort Algorithm for RISC Processors	1996	SIGMOD	7.290256e-05
3,674	FastSort: A Distributed Single-Input Single-Output External Sort	1990	SIGMOD	7.1065658e-05
5,332	Fast and Approximate Stream Mining of Quantiles and Frequencies Using Graphics Processors	2005	SIGMOD	6.1754712e-05

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