A novel deterministic sampling scheme with applications to broadcast-efficient sorting on the reconfigurable mesh

The main contribution of this work is to present a simple deterministic sampling strategy that, when used for bucket sorting, yields buckets that are remarkably well balanced, making costly balancing unnecessary. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of a deterministic sampling strategy featuring this performance. Although the strategy is perfectly general, we illustrate its power by devising a VLSI-optimal, 0(1) time sorting algorithm for the reconfigurable mesh. As a by-product of the inherent simplicity of our sampling and bucketing scheme, we show that our sorting algorithm can be implemented using only 35 broadcast operations, a substantial improvement over the previously best known algorithm that requires 59 broadcasts. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.