Cache-efficient string sorting using copying

Abstract

Burstsort is a cache-oriented sorting technique that uses a dynamic trie to efficiently divide large sets of string keys into related subsets small enough to sort in cache. In our original burstsort, string keys sharing a common prefix were managed via a bucket of pointers represented as a list or array; this approach was found to be up to twice as fast as the previous best string sorts, mostly because of a sharp reduction in out-of-cache references. In this paper, we introduce C-burstsort, which copies the unexamined tail of each key to the bucket and discards the original key to improve data locality. On both Intel and PowerPC architectures, and on a wide range of string types, we show tha..