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Sorting spitballing

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
distributed-systems

Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points and ends mid-proposal. Start by reviewing the complete issue and the repository's existing distributed sorting and data-distribution work. Done would require a decided approach, an implementation scope, and tests or other validation criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Some sorting ideas for consideration:

  • It is fairly reliable that communication overhead and latency are the dominant factors, so we want to minimize the total amount of communication.
  • In general, sorting requires an all-to-all communication step: every worker has to send and receive data to and from every other worker, so there is potentially a lot of communication.
  • We want to minimize the all-to-all communication as much as possible.
  • We also assume that sorting the local array is efficient and a solved problem.
  • If we can get all the right data to each worker, then sort the data locally with a local sort, then we're done. So the problem reduces to getting the right data to each worker.
  • If we allow the sorted array to have an irregular block distribution that does not match the distribution of the original array, then that gives a lot of flexibility.

Assume we have n workers that share a block-distributed distarray. Assume we have some way to choose n-1 pivots that partition the global array into n sections such that the number of elements in section i equals the number of elements on worker with rank i. Then the sort can proceed as follows:

  • Partition each worker's localarray into n sections using the `n-1
Dominant language
Python
Stars
5
Forks
1
No merged PRs in 30d

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