SCALABLE ALGORITHMS FOR BICHROMATIC LINE SEGMENT INTERSECTION PROBLEMS ON COARSE GRAINED MULTICOMPUTERS

We present output-sensitive scalable parallel algorithms for bichromatic line segment intersection problems for the coarse grained multicomputer model. Under the assumption that n≥p2, where n is the number of line segments and p the number of processors, we obtain an intersection counting algorithm with a time complexity of [Formula: see text], where Ts(m, p) is the time used to sort m items on a p processor machine. The first term captures the time spent in sequential computation performed locally by each processor. The second term captures the interprocessor communication time. An additional [Formula: see text] time in sequential computation is spent on the reporting of the k intersections. As the sequential time complexity is O(n log n) for counting and an additional time O(k) for reporting, we obtain a speedup of [Formula: see text] in the sequential part of the algorithm. The speedup in the communication part obviously depends on the underlying architecture. For example for a hypercube it ranges between [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] depending on the ratio of n and p. As the reporting does not involve more interprocessor communication than the counting, the algorithm achieves a full speedup of p for k≥ O( max (n log n log p, n log 3 p)) even on a hypercube.