Many Sequential Iterative Algorithms Can Be Parallel and (Nearly) Work-efficient
Zheqi Shen, Zijin Wan, Yan Gu, Yihan Sun · 2022
Some recent papers showed that many sequential iterative algorithms can be directly parallelized, by identifying the dependences between the input objects. This approach yields many simple and practical parallel algorithms, but there are still challenges to achieve work-efficiency and high-parallelism. Work-efficiency means that the number of operations is asymptotically the same as the best sequential solution. This can be hard for certain problems where the number of dependences between objects is asymptotically more than optimal sequential work, and we cannot even afford the cost to generate them. To achieve high-parallelism, we always want it to process as many objects as possible in parallel. The goal is to achieve O (D) span for a problem with the deepest dependence length D. We refer to this property as round-efficiency. This paper presents work-efficient and round-efficient algorithms for a variety of classic problems and propose general approaches to do so.