Building a parallel pipelined external memory algorithm library

Large and fast hard disks for little money have enabled the processing of huge amounts of data on a single machine. For this purpose, the well-established STXXL library provides a framework for external memory algorithms with an easy-to-use interface. However, the clock speed of processors cannot keep up with the increasing bandwidth of parallel disks, making many algorithms actually compute-bound. To overcome this steadily worsening limitation, we exploit today's multi-core processors with two new approaches. First, we parallelize the internal computation of the encapsulated external memory algorithms by utilizing the MCSTL library. Second, we augment the unique pipelining feature of the STXXL, to enable automatic task parallelization. We show using synthetic and practical use cases that the combination of both techniques increases performance greatly.