Merge Sorted Arrays, Then Scale to Huge Files and a Global Sort of N Files

Merge Sorted Arrays, Then Scale to Huge Files and a Global Sort of N Files

Company: NVIDIA

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Overview: Merge two sorted integer arrays, then scale the same task to two sorted files that exceed memory and to N large files that must be globally sorted and stored. The question tests streaming I/O with bounded memory, multi-way merging, external merge sort costs, distributed range partitioning, skew handling, and a storage layout readers can query.