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#### Waste makes haste: tight bounds for loose parallel sorting

##### MPS-Authors
http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/cone/persons/resource/persons44564

Hagerup,  Torben
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/cone/persons/resource/persons45250

Raman,  Rajeev
Algorithms and Complexity, MPI for Informatics, Max Planck Society;

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##### Fulltext (public)

MPI-I-92-141.pdf
(Any fulltext), 19MB

##### Supplementary Material (public)
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##### Citation

Hagerup, T., & Raman, R.(1992). Waste makes haste: tight bounds for loose parallel sorting (MPI-I-92-141). Saarbrücken: Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik.

Cite as: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0014-B70C-1
##### Abstract
Conventional parallel sorting requires the $n$ input keys to be output in an array of size $n$, and is known to take $\Omega({{\log n}/{\log\log n}})$ time using any polynomial number of processors. The lower bound does not apply to the more wasteful'' convention of {\em padded sorting}, which requires the keys to be output in sorted order in an array of size $(1 + o(1)) n$. We give very fast randomized CRCW PRAM algorithms for several padded-sorting problems. Applying only pairwise comparisons to the input and using $kn$ processors, where $2\le k\le n$, we can padded-sort $n$ keys in $O({{\log n}/{\log k}})$ time with high probability (whp), which is the best possible (expected) run time for any comparison-based algorithm. We also show how to padded-sort $n$ independent random numbers in $O(\log^*\! n)$ time whp with $O(n)$ work, which matches a recent lower bound, and how to padded-sort $n$ integers in the range $1..n$ in constant time whp using $n$ processors. If the integer sorting is required to be stable, we can still solve the problem in $O({{\log\log n}/{\log k}})$ time whp using $kn$ processors, for any $k$ with $2\le k\le\log n$. The integer sorting results require the nonstandard OR PRAM; alternative implementations on standard PRAM variants run in $O(\log\log n)$ time whp. As an application of our padded-sorting algorithms, we can solve approximate prefix summation problems of size~$n$ with $O(n)$ work in constant time whp on the OR PRAM, and in $O(\log\log n)$ time whp on standard PRAM variants.