The cache-oblivious model of computation is a two-level memory model with the assumption that the parameters of the model are unknown to the algorithms. A consequence of this assumption is that an algorithm efficient in the cache oblivious model is automatically efficient in a multi-level memory model. Since the introduction of the cache-oblivious model by Frigo et al. in 1999, a number of algorithms and data structures in the model has been proposed and analyzed. However, less attention has been given to whether the nice theoretical proporities of cache-oblivious algorithms carry over into practice. This paper is an algorithmic engineering study of cache-oblivious sorting. We investigate a number of implementation issues and parameters choices for the cache-oblivious sorting algorithm Lazy Funnelsort by empirical methods, and compare the final algorithm with Quicksort, the established standard for comparison based sorting, as well as with recent cache-aware proposals. The main result is a carefully implemented cache-oblivious sorting algorithm, which we compare to the best implementation of Quicksort we can find, and find that it competes very well for input residing in RAM, and outperforms Quicksort for input on disk. 1

This paper studies the problem of computing the most frequent element (the mode) by means of a distributed algorithm where the elements are located at the nodes of a network. Let k denote the number of distinct elements and further let mi be the number of occurrences of the element ei in the ordered list of occurrences m1> m2> =...> = mk. We give a deterministic distributed algorithm with time complexity O(D+k) where D denotes the diameter of the graph, which is essentially tight. As our main contribution, a Monte Carlo algorithm is presented which computes the mode in O(D + F2/m21 * log k) time with high probability, where the frequency moment F ` is deo/ned as F ` = Pki=1 m`i. This algorithm is substantially faster than the deterministic algorithm for various relevant frequency distributions. Moreover, we provide a lower bound of \Omega (D + F5/(m51B)), where B is the maximum message size, that captures the effect of the frequency distribution on the time complexity to compute the mode.