A general class of resource tradeoffs

In this paper we study a class of resource tradeoffs that arise in such problems as parallel sorting algorithms, linear recursion schemata, VLSI layouts, and searching problems. The tradeoffs can all be traced to the common structure of a multiway tree, and the special class of binomial trees (which are isomorphic to the binomial coefficients) correspond to particularly efficient algorithms. Although all of the tradeoffs that we exhibit are upper bounds, we present evidence to show that the approach can also lead to lower bounds.