About: Cache-oblivious distribution sort

The cache-oblivious distribution sort is a comparison-based sorting algorithm. It is similar to quicksort, but it is a cache-oblivious algorithm, designed for a setting where the number of elements to sort is too large to fit in a cache where operations are done. In the external memory model, the number of memory transfers it needs to perform a sort of items on a machine with cache of size and cache lines of length is , under the tall cache assumption that . This number of memory transfers has been shown to be asymptotically optimal for comparison sorts. This distribution sort also achieves the asymptotically optimal runtime complexity of .