Parallelizing sort

[Nima Nikzad]

Hello coreutils community,
I am new to the exciting world of open source development and thought I
should introduce my self and get some feedback on what I am working on.  My
name is Nima Nikzad and I, along with a small group of students, am working
on changes to coreutils as part of a project for Prof. Paul Eggert's
software engineering course at UCLA.  Specifically, we are looking at how we
can better utilize modern multi-core processors when sorting and merging
files.  My group is first taking a look at how to parallelize the external
sort phase of sort's operation.  Another group of students is taking a look
at in-memory sort while we are working on this.

Has anyone already tried their hand at parallelizing this code?  Are there
any special considerations we should keep in mind while moving forward?  My
group was looking to tackle the problem by using OpenMP as we have some
experience working with it in the past and like that we can do quite a bit
with it while (hopefully) having little impact on the structure of
the existing code.  Does anyone have any feedback on threading technologies
that would be appropriate for this project or does anyone think OpenMP is a
poor choice?

I look forward to hearing your suggestions!  We are looking to have
something implemented and benchmarked soon and I will be sure to keep in
contact with the community.  Please feel free to reach me at nnikzad at
ucla.edu.  Thank you!

- Nima Nikzad