Excessive power consumption emerged as a major obstacle to achieving exascale performance in next-generation supercomputers, creating a need to explore new ways to reduce those requirements. In this study, we present a comprehensive empirical investigation of a power advantage anticipated in the mergesort method based on identifying a feature expected to be physically power efficient. We use a highperformance quicksort as a realistic baseline to compare. Results show a generic mergosort to have a distinct advantage over an optimized quicksort lending support to our expectation. They also help develop some insights toward power efficiency gains likely meaningful in a future exascale context where trading some of the abundant performance for much needed power savings in a ubiquitous computation may prove interesting.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.