Sorting large records on a cell broadband engine

We consider the sorting of a large number of multifield records on the Cell Broadband engine. We show that our method, which generates runs using a 2-way merge and then merges these runs using a 4-way merge, outperforms previously proposed sort methods that use either comb sort or bitonic sort for run generation followed by a 2-way odd-even merging of runs. Interestingly, best performance is achieved by using scalar memory copy instructions rather than vector instructions.