Performance Evaluation of Parallel Programs

In this assignment you will examine the performance of a parallel sorting algorithm. Let’s start with the sequential case. The program that you are going to investigate is based on the Quicksort algorithm. For a given size, a vector is created and filled with random numbers. Then qsort() from the standard C library is called to sort the array. In the parallel case, we also create an array of a specific size and insert random integers at each array position. Then, depending on the user’s choice several threads are started. Each thread is responsible for sorting one part of the array. The array is chunked into equal sized shares. When all threads have finished the sorting, one thread will collect the results. This thread creates a new array and fills the results from left to right. For an array position i the collecting thread will check which of the p other threads has the smallest value. This value is removed from this thread pj and inserted into the position i of the result array. This procedure is continued until all elements have been inserted into the result array.