x86-simd-sort

C++ template library for high performance SIMD based sorting routines for built-in integers and floats (16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit data types) and custom defined C++ objects. The sorting routines are accelerated using AVX-512/AVX2 when available. The library auto picks the best version depending on the processor it is run on. If you are looking for the AVX-512 or AVX2 specific implementations, please see README file under src/ directory. The following routines are currently supported:

Sort an array of custom defined class objects (uses O(N) space)

template <typename T, typename Func>
void x86simdsort::object_qsort(T *arr, uint32_t arrsize, Func key_func)

T is any user defined struct or class and arr is a pointer to the first element in the array of objects of type T. Func is a lambda function that computes the key value for each object which is the metric used to sort the objects. Func needs to have the following signature:

[] (T obj) -> key_t { key_t key; /* compute key for obj */ return key; }

Note that the return type of the key key_t needs to be one of the following : [float, uint32_t, int32_t, double, uint64_t, int64_t]. object_qsort has a space complexity of O(N). Specifically, it requires arrsize * sizeof(key_t) bytes to store a vector with all the keys and an additional arrsize * sizeof(uint32_t) bytes to store the indexes of the object array. For performance reasons, we support object_qsort only when the array size is less than or equal to UINT32_MAX. An example usage of object_qsort is provided in the examples section. Refer to section to get a sense of how fast this is relative to std::sort.

Sort an array of built-in integers and floats

void x86simdsort::qsort(T* arr, size_t size, bool hasnan, bool descending);
void x86simdsort::qselect(T* arr, size_t k, size_t size, bool hasnan, bool descending);
void x86simdsort::partial_qsort(T* arr, size_t k, size_t size, bool hasnan, bool descending);

Supported datatypes: T $\in$ [_Float16, uint16_t, int16_t, float, uint32_t, int32_t, double, uint64_t, int64_t]

Key-value sort routines on pairs of arrays

void x86simdsort::keyvalue_qsort(T1* key, T2* val, size_t size, bool hasnan);

Supported datatypes: T1, T2 $\in$ [float, uint32_t, int32_t, double, uint64_t, int64_t] Note that keyvalue sort is not yet supported for 16-bit data types.

Arg sort routines on arrays

std::vector<size_t> arg = x86simdsort::argsort(T* arr, size_t size, bool hasnan, bool descending);
std::vector<size_t> arg = x86simdsort::argselect(T* arr, size_t k, size_t size, bool hasnan);

Supported datatypes: T $\in$ [_Float16, uint16_t, int16_t, float, uint32_t, int32_t, double, uint64_t, int64_t]

Build/Install

meson is the used build system. Command to build and install the library:

meson setup --buildtype release builddir && cd builddir
meson compile
sudo meson install

Once installed, you can use pkg-config --cflags --libs x86simdsortcpp to populate the right cflags and ldflags to compile and link your C++ program. This repository also contains a test suite and benchmarking suite which are written using googletest and google benchmark frameworks respectively. You can configure meson to build them both by using -Dbuild_tests=true and -Dbuild_benchmarks=true.

Example usage

Sort an array of floats

#include "x86simdsort.h"

int main() {
    std::vector<float> arr{1000};
    x86simdsort::qsort(arr.data(), 1000, true);
    return 0;
}

Sort an array of Points using object_qsort

#include "x86simdsort.h"
#include <cmath>

struct Point {
    double x, y, z;
};

int main() {
    std::vector<Point> arr{1000};
    // Sort an array of Points by its x value:
    x86simdsort::object_qsort(arr.data(), 1000, [](Point p) { return p.x; });
    // Sort an array of Points by its distance from origin:
    x86simdsort::object_qsort(arr.data(), 1000, [](Point p) {
        return sqrt(p.x*p.x+p.y*p.y+p.z*p.z);
        });
    return 0;
}

Details

• x86simdsort::qsort is equivalent to qsort in C or std::sort in C++.
• x86simdsort::qselect is equivalent to std::nth_element in C++ or np.partition in NumPy.
• x86simdsort::partial_qsort is equivalent to std::partial_sort in C++.
• x86simdsort::argsort is equivalent to np.argsort in NumPy.
• x86simdsort::argselect is equivalent to np.argpartition in NumPy.

Supported datatypes: uint16_t, int16_t, _Float16, uint32_t, int32_t, float, uint64_t, int64_t, double. Note that _Float16 will require building this library with g++ >= 12.x. All the functions have an optional argument bool hasnan set to false by default (these are relevant to floating point data types only). If your array has NAN's, the the behaviour of the sorting routine is undefined. If hasnan is set to true, NAN's are always sorted to the end of the array. In addition to that, qsort will replace all your NAN's with std::numeric_limits<T>::quiet_NaN. The original bit-exact NaNs in the input are not preserved. Also note that the arg methods (argsort and argselect) will not use the SIMD based algorithms if they detect NAN's in the array. You can read details of all the implementations here.

Performance comparison on AVX-512: object_qsort v/s std::sort

Performance of object_qsort can vary significantly depending on the defintion of the custom class and we highly recommend benchmarking before using it. For the sake of illustration, we provide a few examples in ./benchmarks/bench-objsort.hpp which measures performance of object_qsort relative to std::sort when sorting an array of 3D points represented by the class: struct Point {double x, y, z;} and struct Point {float x, y, x;}. We sort these points based on several different metrics:

• sort by coordinate x
• sort by manhanttan distance (relative to origin): abs(x) + abx(y) + abs(z)
• sort by Euclidean distance (relative to origin): sqrt(x*x + y*y + z*z)
• sort by Chebyshev distance (relative to origin): max(abs(x), abs(y), abs(z))

The performance data (shown in the plot below) can be collected by building the benchmarks suite and running ./builddir/benchexe --benchmark_filter==*obj*. The data plot shown below was collected on a processor with AVX-512. For the simplest of cases where we want to sort an array of struct by one of its members, object_qsort can be up-to 5x faster for 32-bit data type and about 4x for 64-bit data type. It tends to do even better when the metric to sort by gets more complicated. Sorting by Euclidean distance can be up-to 10x faster.

Downstream projects using x86-simd-sort

• NumPy uses this as a submodule to accelerate np.sort, np.argsort, np.partition and np.argpartition.
• A slightly modifed version this library has been integrated into openJDK.
• GRAPE: C++ library for parallel graph processing.
• AVX-512 version of the key-value sort has been submitted to Oceanbase.