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Merge sort parallelizes well due to the use of the divide-and-conquer method. Several different parallel variants of the algorithm have been developed over the years. Some parallel merge sort algorithms are strongly related to the sequential top-down merge algorithm while others have a different general structure and use the K-way merge method.
The merge algorithm is used repeatedly in the merge sort algorithm. An example merge sort is given in the illustration. It starts with an unsorted array of 7 integers. The array is divided into 7 partitions; each partition contains 1 element and is sorted. The sorted partitions are then merged to produce larger, sorted, partitions, until 1 ...
Suppose that such an algorithm existed, then we could construct a comparison-based sorting algorithm with running time O(n f(n)) as follows: Chop the input array into n arrays of size 1. Merge these n arrays with the k-way merge algorithm. The resulting array is sorted and the algorithm has a running time in O(n f(n)).
Sorting small arrays optimally (in the fewest comparisons and swaps) or fast (i.e. taking into account machine-specific details) is still an open research problem, with solutions only known for very small arrays (<20 elements). Similarly optimal (by various definitions) sorting on a parallel machine is an open research topic.
Block sort, or block merge sort, is a sorting algorithm combining at least two merge operations with an insertion sort to arrive at O(n log n) (see Big O notation) in-place stable sorting time. It gets its name from the observation that merging two sorted lists, A and B , is equivalent to breaking A into evenly sized blocks , inserting each A ...
External sorting algorithms generally fall into two types, distribution sorting, which resembles quicksort, and external merge sort, which resembles merge sort. External merge sort typically uses a hybrid sort-merge strategy. In the sorting phase, chunks of data small enough to fit in main memory are read, sorted, and written out to a temporary ...
This is done by merging runs until certain criteria are fulfilled. Timsort has been Python's standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3 (since version 3.11 using the Powersort merge policy [5]), and is used to sort arrays of non-primitive type in Java SE 7, [6] on the Android platform, [7] in GNU Octave, [8] on V8, [9] and Swift. [10]
Batcher's odd–even mergesort [1] is a generic construction devised by Ken Batcher for sorting networks of size O(n (log n) 2) and depth O((log n) 2), where n is the number of items to be sorted. Although it is not asymptotically optimal, Knuth concluded in 1998, with respect to the AKS network that "Batcher's method is much better, unless n ...