Fast sort of floating-point data for data engineering

In this paper, a novel external sort algorithm that improves the speedup of the sorting of floating-point numbers has been described. Our algorithm decreases the computation time significantly by applying integer arithmetic on floating-point data in the IEEE-754 standard or similar formats. We conducted experiments with synthetic data on a 32-processor Linux cluster; in the case of the internal sort alone, the Giga-byte sorting achieved approximately fivefold speedups. Furthermore, the sorting achieved twofold or greater improvements over the typical parallel sort method, network of workstations (NOW)-sort. Moreover, the sorting scheme performance is independent of the computing platform. Thus, our sorting method can be successfully applied to binary search, data mining, numerical simulations, and graphics.