I/O-Optimal Distribution Sweeping on Private-Cache Chip Multiprocessors

The parallel external memory (PEM) model has been used as a basis for the design and analysis of a wide range of algorithms for private-cache multi-core architectures. As a tool for developing geometric algorithms in this model, a parallel version of the I/O-efficient distribution sweeping framework was introduced recently, and a number of algorithms for problems on axis-aligned objects were obtained using this framework. The obtained algorithms were efficient but not optimal. In this paper, we improve the framework to obtain algorithms with the optimal I/O complexity of O(sortp(N) + K/PB) for a number of problems on axis aligned objects; P denotes the number of cores/processors, B denotes the number of elements that fit in a cache line, N and K denote the sizes of the input and output, respectively, and sortp(N) denotes the I/O complexity of sorting N items using P processors in the PEM model. To obtain the above improvement, we present a new one-dimensional batched range counting algorithm on a sorted list of ranges and points that achieves an I/O complexity of 0((N + K)/PB), where K is the sum of the counts of all the ranges. The key to achieving efficient load balancing among the processors in this algorithm is a new method to count the output without enumerating it, which might be of independent interest.