A Practical Quicksort Algorithm for Graphics Processors

Report, 2008

In this paper we describe GPU-Quicksort, an efficient Quicksort algorithm suitable for highly parallel multi-core graphics processors. Quicksort has previously been considered an inefficient sorting solution for graphics processors, but we show that in CUDA, NVIDIA's programming platform for general purpose computations on graphical processors, GPU-Quicksort performs better than the fastest known sorting implementations for graphics processors, such as radix and bitonic sort. Quicksort can thus be seen as a viable alternative for sorting large quantities of data on graphics processors.