A simple array processor for binary prefix sums

Abstract

The task of computing the prefix sums of a binary sequence (BPS, for short) arises frequently in expression evaluation, data and storage compaction, routing, processor assignment, and operating system design. The main goal of this work is to propose an efficient special-purpose architecture for the BPS problem. Our design exploits a novel and elegant idea that allows us to considerably reduce the number of processors of the best-known design. The resulting design is simple and intuitive and scales easily to handle input sequences of various sizes.