Sorting with GPUs: A Survey

Sorting is a fundamental operation in computer science and is a bottleneck in many important fields. Sorting is critical to database applications, online search and indexing, biomedical computing, and many other applications. The explosive growth in computational power and availability of GPU coprocessors has allowed sort operations on GPUs to be done much faster than any equivalently priced CPU. Current trends in GPU computing shows that this explosive growth in GPU capabilities is likely to continue for some time. As such, there is a need to develop algorithms to effectively harness the power of GPUs for crucial applications such as sorting.