Sorting is pretty common in the numerics world because a lot of algorithms or techniques can be optimized heavily with sorted inputs. You either get to skip steps or bisect the dataset. Sort of like how most fast fft implementations will run 10-20% faster if you pad vectors to reach a power of 2 length. A typical "preprocess pipeline" would involve splitting vectors into power of 2 sizes or padding them to maximize cache lines, normalizing (and often mapping to an integer domain), and sorting.