Sublinear parallel algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor of two integers

The advent of practical parallel processors has caused a reexamination of many existing algorithms with the hope of discovering a parallel implementation. One of the oldest and best known algorithms is Euclid´s algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor (GCD). In this paper we present a parallel algorithm to compute the GCD of two integers. The two salient features of the algorithm are: the observation based on the pigeon hole principle that we can easily find an integer combination of the two integers A and B which has fewer bits than n and the idea of working in phases so as to perform arithmetics on n-bit integers only once every phase, the more frequent operations being performed on O(log/sup 2/n)-bit integers. It appears that yet another approach is needed if the GCD is to be computed in poly-log parallel time.