Work-time optimal k-merge algorithms on the PRAM

Abstract

The k-merge problem, given a collection of k, (2/spl les/k/spl les/n), sorted sequences of total length a asks to merge them into a new sorted sequence. The main contribution of the work is to propose simple and intuitive work-time optimal algorithms for the k-merge problem on two PRAM models. Specifically their k-merge algorithms perform O(nlogk) work and run in O(log n) time on the EREW-PRAM and in O (log log n+log k) time on the CREW-PRAM, respectively.