Efficient Algorithms for Sorting and Synchronization

By Andrew Tridgell

This thesis presents efficient algorithms for internal and external parallel sorting and remote data update. The sorting algorithms approach the problem by concentrating first on highly efficient but incorrect algorithms followed by a cleanup phase that completes the sort. The remote data update algorithm, rsync, operates by exchanging block signature information followed by a simple hash search algorithm for block matching at arbitrary byte boundaries. The last chapter of the thesis examines a number of related algorithms for text compression, differencing and incremental backup.
Internal Parallel Sorting
My first introduction to the problem of parallel sorting came from a problem in the implementation of an automatic speech recognition training program. A set of speech data needed to be normalized in order to be used as the input to a recurrent neural network system and I decided that a quick-and-dirty way of doing this would be to sort the data, then sample it at regular intervals to generate a histogram.

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