MemSort: In-Memory Sorting Architecture

Sorting is one of the most fundamental operations in computer programming and used in countless algorithms. The performance of traditional von Neumann computers running sorting is limited by the bandwidth between memories and processors. Computing-in-memory (CiM) is a promising technology which has the potential to solve the “memory wall” bottleneck. CiM is suitable for data-intensive applications, and it is ideal for accelerating large-scale data sorting. In this paper, we propose a novel in-memory sorting accelerator, named MemSort, based on a proposed in-memory comparison array design based on emerging non-volatile devices. MemSort supports three sort operations including counting sort, merging sort, and the combination of counting sort and merging sort. We build a performance model for the combination sort which enables flexible allocation of resources under given constraints to meet the requirements of various applications for sorting. The evaluation results show that MemSort shows significant performance improvement and energy efficiency at both the system level and application level when processing large-scale data sorting. Compared with the CPU implementation, MemSort achieves energy savings of 19.69-72.75x and speedups of 24.48-38.58 x with the same power constraint. MemSort's throughput is at least 4.86 x higher than that of the recent FPGA-based sorting accelerator FANS. MemSort exhibits more than 11 x throughput and 4.03 x area efficiency, compared with the recent CiM - based sorting accelerator, RIME.