Parallel Sorting of Randomly Generated Grid Jobs on a Single-Processor System

Improvements in computer technologies continue to shape the presence and the future of modernization, driven by the need for faster and more efficient processing, most chip manufacturers have abandoned the single-processor system and turned attention to other hardware technologies like the multicore system. However, should the baby (single-processor system) be thrown away with the bathwater? Parallelization which defines the era of the multicore if properly exploited on single-processor systems can improve performance. This work exploits thread-level parallelism on the single processor system. This work uses thread-level parallelism to sort randomly generated grid jobs. The method randomly generates grid jobs which are then sorted into groups based on the computing requirements of the job. Using fuzzy rules, the sorting is done with a range of threads from one to eight in steps of two. For each set of sorting, the time of completion is recorded. The analysis shows that increases in the thread improve performance on the single processor system. However, as the number of jobs increases, the execution time also increases for all threads – indicating a general performance decline. The analysis also showed a steady improvement in performance as the number of threads increased from one to two and between two and four threads. However, the improvement leveled off at four threads and six threads and degraded between six threads and eight threads. This indicates that as the number of threads increases, the single processor system poses a bottleneck to performance due to context switches and other overheads. We therefore recommend that for thread-level parallelization on the single-processor systems, the number of threads should not be more than four.