How to partly sort arrays on CUDA? - sorting

Question

Problem
Provided I have two arrays:
const int N = 1000000;
float A[N];
myStruct *B[N];
The numbers in A can be positive or negative (e.g. A[N]={3,2,-1,0,5,-2}), how can I make the array A partly sorted (all positive values first, not need to be sorted, then negative values)(e.g. A[N]={3,2,5,0,-1,-2} or A[N]={5,2,3,0,-2,-1}) on the GPU? The array B should be changed according to A (A is keys, B is values).
Since the scale of A,B can be very large, I think the sort algorithm should be implemented on GPU (especially on CUDA, because I use this platform). Surely I know thrust::sort_by_key can do this work, but it does muck extra work since I do not need the array A&B to be sorted entirely.
Has anyone come across this kind of problem?
Thrust example
thrust::sort_by_key(thrust::device_ptr<float> (A),
thrust::device_ptr<float> ( A + N ),
thrust::device_ptr<myStruct> ( B ),
thrust::greater<float>() );

Answer 1

Thrust's documentation on Github is not up-to-date. As #JaredHoberock said, thrust::partition is the way to go since it now supports stencils. You may need to get a copy from the Github repository:
git clone git://github.com/thrust/thrust.git
Then run scons doc in the Thrust folder to get an updated documentation, and use these updated Thrust sources when compiling your code (nvcc -I/path/to/thrust ...). With the new stencil partition, you can do:
#include <thrust/partition.h>
#include <thrust/execution_policy.h>
#include <thrust/iterator/zip_iterator.h>
#include <thrust/tuple.h>
struct is_positive
{
__host__ __device__
bool operator()(const int &x)
{
return x >= 0;
}
};
thrust::partition(thrust::host, // if you want to test on the host
thrust::make_zip_iterator(thrust::make_tuple(keyVec.begin(), valVec.begin())),
thrust::make_zip_iterator(thrust::make_tuple(keyVec.end(), valVec.end())),
keyVec.begin(),
is_positive());
This returns:
Before:
keyVec = 0 -1 2 -3 4 -5 6 -7 8 -9
valVec = 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
After:
keyVec = 0 2 4 6 8 -5 -3 -7 -1 -9
valVec = 0 2 4 6 8 5 3 7 1 9
Note that the 2 partitions are not necessarily sorted. Also, the order may differ between the original vectors and the partitions. If this is important to you, you can use thrust::stable_partition:
stable_partition differs from partition in that stable_partition is
guaranteed to preserve relative order. That is, if x and y are
elements in [first, last), such that pred(x) == pred(y), and if x
precedes y, then it will still be true after stable_partition that x
precedes y.
If you want a complete example, here it is:
#include <thrust/host_vector.h>
#include <thrust/device_vector.h>
#include <thrust/partition.h>
#include <thrust/iterator/zip_iterator.h>
#include <thrust/tuple.h>
struct is_positive
{
__host__ __device__
bool operator()(const int &x)
{
return x >= 0;
}
};
void print_vec(const thrust::host_vector<int>& v)
{
for(size_t i = 0; i < v.size(); i++)
std::cout << " " << v[i];
std::cout << "\n";
}
int main ()
{
const int N = 10;
thrust::host_vector<int> keyVec(N);
thrust::host_vector<int> valVec(N);
int sign = 1;
for(int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
{
keyVec[i] = sign * i;
valVec[i] = i;
sign *= -1;
}
// Copy host to device
thrust::device_vector<int> d_keyVec = keyVec;
thrust::device_vector<int> d_valVec = valVec;
std::cout << "Before:\n keyVec = ";
print_vec(keyVec);
std::cout << " valVec = ";
print_vec(valVec);
// Partition key-val on device
thrust::partition(thrust::make_zip_iterator(thrust::make_tuple(d_keyVec.begin(), d_valVec.begin())),
thrust::make_zip_iterator(thrust::make_tuple(d_keyVec.end(), d_valVec.end())),
d_keyVec.begin(),
is_positive());
// Copy result back to host
keyVec = d_keyVec;
valVec = d_valVec;
std::cout << "After:\n keyVec = ";
print_vec(keyVec);
std::cout << " valVec = ";
print_vec(valVec);
}
UPDATE
I made a quick comparison with the thrust::sort_by_key version, and the thrust::partition implementation does seem to be faster (which is what we could naturally expect). Here is what I obtain on NVIDIA Visual Profiler, with N = 1024 * 1024, with the sort version on the left, and the partition version on the right. You may want to do the same kind of tests on your own.

Answer 2

How about this?:
Count how many positive numbers to determine the inflexion point
Evenly divide each side of the inflexion point into groups (negative-groups are all same length but different length to positive-groups. these groups are the memory chunks for the results)
Use one kernel call (one thread) per chunk pair
Each kernel swaps any out-of-place elements in the input groups into the desired output groups. You will need to flag any chunks that have more swaps than the maximum so that you can fix them during subsequent iterations.
Repeat until done
Memory traffic is swaps only (from original element position, to sorted position). I don't know if this algorithm sounds like anything already defined...

Answer 3

You should be able to achieve this in thrust simply with a modification of your comparison operator:
struct my_compare
{
__device__ __host__ bool operator()(const float x, const float y) const
{
return !((x<0.0f) && (y>0.0f));
}
};
thrust::sort_by_key(thrust::device_ptr<float> (A),
thrust::device_ptr<float> ( A + N ),
thrust::device_ptr<myStruct> ( B ),
my_compare() );