A Near-Memory Radix Sort Accelerator with Parallel 1-bit Sorter

Abstract

Sorting is one of the most fundamental operations for many applications. For efficient sorting, data locality can be exploited by processing subdivided data in parallel. This work presents a high-performance and area-efficient near-memory radix sort accelerator where end-to-end sorting is performed locally. With a parallel 1-bit radix sorter, it achieves high throughput by processing multiple keys per cycle. Tested with Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU104 FPGA, the experimental result shows up to 10x performance speedup over CPU. It is highly area-efficient and can be integrated into each processing node of a distributed computing system with low area cost.