METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR SORTING DATA IN A CLOUD-COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT AND OTHER DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

摘要

The current document is directed to a method and system for data processing in cloud-computing environments and other distributed-computing environments. Implementations of a merge sort suitable for the sorting of data within cloud-computing environments and other distributed-computing environments are disclosed. These implementations takes advantage of the massive parallelism available in cloud-computing environments as well as take into consideration numerous constraints regarding data-storage and data-retrieval operations in a cloud-computing environment. The implementations provide a type of data-sorting method and system that iteratively carries out highly parallel merge-sort operations that can be effectively applied over a range of data-set sizes up to extremely large data sets.