The Design and Analysis of BucketSort for Bubble Memory Secondary Storage

BucketSort is a new external sorting algorithm for very large files that is a substantial improvement over merge sorting with disks. BucketSort requires an associative secondary storage device, which can be realized by large disk drives with logic-per-track capabilities or by magnetic bubble memory (MBM). This paper describes and analyzes a hypothetical Bucket-Sort implementation that uses bubble memory. A new software marking technique is introduced that reduces the effective time for an associative search.