We have designed a radix sort algorithm for vector multiprocessors and have implemented the algorithm on the CRAY Y-MP. On one processor of the Y-MP, our sort is over 5 times faster on large sorting problems than the optimized library sort provided by CRAY Research. On eight processors we achieve an additional speedup of almost 5, yielding a routine over 25 times faster than the library sort. Using this multiprocessor version, we can sort at a rate of 15 million 64-bit keys per second. Our sorting algorithm is adapted from a data-parallel algorithm previously designed for a highly parallel Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) computer, the Connection Machine CM-2. To develop our version we introduce three general techniques for mapping data-parallel algorithms ontovector multiprocessors. These techniques allow us to fully vectorize and parallelize the algorithm. The paper also derives equations that model the performance of our algorithm on the Y-MP. These equations are then used t...

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