Corey sez "I decided to see what sort of speed-up I could get just doing a straight brute-force sort. First, I wanted a pure Ruby implementation. Next, I wanted a RubyInline version. Finally, I wanted to use RubyInline with Thrust. Here is the code I used."
The numbers? Bad ASS!
(Thrust is a C++ library that uses the GPU for parallel operations.)
Well, the comparison isn't exactly apples-to-apples, but it was a fun little experiment to whip up. RubyInline made it insanely easy to do, and thrust just really finished it off nicely. Love the stuff you are working on over here!