An Efficient Sorting Algorithm for Non-Volatile Memory

• Published in: International journal of software engineering and knowledge engineering Vol. 31; no. 11n12; pp. 1603 - 1621
• Main Authors: Chu, Zhaole, Luo, Yongping, Jin, Peiquan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore World Scientific Publishing Company 01.12.2021; World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte., Ltd
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer architecture; Dynamic random access memory; Energy consumption; Performance enhancement; Sorting algorithms; Non-volatile memory; hybrid memory; sorting algorithm
• ISSN: 0218-1940; 1793-6403
• DOI: 10.1142/S0218194021400143

Non-volatile memory (NVM) has emerged as an alternative of the next-generation memory due to its non-volatility, byte addressability, high storage-density, and low-energy consumption. However, NVM also has some limitations, e.g. asymmetric read and write latency. Therefore, at present, it is not realistic to completely replace DRAM with NVM in computer systems. A more feasible scheme is to adopt the hybrid memory architecture composed of NVM and DRAM. Following the assumption of hybrid memory architecture, in this paper, we propose an NVM-friendly sorting algorithm called NVMSorting. Particularly, we introduce a new concept called Natural Run to improve the existing MONTRES algorithm. Further, we apply the proposed NVMSorting to database join algorithms to improve the performance of the existing sort-merge join. To verify the performance of our proposal, we implement six existing sorting algorithms as baselines, including the MONTRES algorithm, and conduct comparative experiments on real Intel Optane DC persistent memory. The results show that NVMSorting outperforms other sorting algorithms in terms of execution time and NVM writes. In addition, the results of the join experiment show that the NVMSorting algorithm achieves the highest performance among all schemes. Especially, in the partially ordered data, the execution time of NVMSorting is 2.9%, 2.7%, and 4.2% less than MONTRES, external sort, and quick sort, respectively. Also, the amount of NVM writes of the NVMSorting is 26.1%, 43.6%, 96.2% less than MONTRES, external sort, and quick sort, respectively.