An efficient sorting algorithm on the multi-mesh network

The shear-sort algorithm on an SIMD mesh model requires 4/spl radic/N+o(/spl radic/N) time for sorting N elements arranged on a /spl radic/N/spl times//spl radic/N mesh. In this paper, we present an algorithm for sorting N elements in time O(N/sup 1/4/) on an SIMD multi-mesh architecture, thereby significantly improving the order of the time complexity. The multi-mesh architecture is built around n/sup 2/ blocks, where each block is an n/spl times/n mesh with n=N/sup 1/4/, so that each processor will uniformly have four neighbors in the final topology.