Parallel Sorting on Heterogeneous Platforms

We present a method for load balancing parallel sorting on heterogeneous networks of workstations and clusters. Load balancing is achieved by exploiting information about the available throughput of the processors. First, the problem is partitioned into subproblems such that the times taken by the processors to solve the subproblems are balanced. Determining the partition involves solving a nonlinear system for finding the subproblem sizes. Second, the data are sorted by each process and are merged by choosing a processor topology which minimizes the critical path.