High-Performance Sorting Algorithms on AIX

Sorting is a topic which has been studied and researched extensively. Given a number of records and one or more fields as the key, the task is to arrange the records into ascending or descending order. Sorting has been one of the most critical applications on mainframe machines. In this paper we describe our approach of offloading sorting operations from mainframe machines and executing the operations on AIX systems. A library was developed to read records from mainframe DASD disks on an AIX machine and thus make offloading other mainframe operations feasible. We analyze the performance of quick sort and radix sort implementations on AIX using mainframe datasets and find that the sorting operations can be improved up to 70%.