As promised, the last of a three-part series of entries on sorting in parallel. Here we present a parallel implementation of merge_sort which runs in O(nlog_2(n)) time and achieves fairly good parallelism.
As promised, this is the second entry on parallel sorting. In this entry, we’ll implement merge_sort, and then give two different ways to make it run in parallel. The first one will be a bit simpler than the second one.
We’re going to begin our discussion of parallel algorithms. We’ll do this by giving a parallel version of quick_sort_plus. We finish this entry by extending the “Almost the Master Theorem” to include cases where f(n) = cn^alpha*log_2(n). In our next entry, we’ll introduce merge_sort as well as a couple different parallel versions of it. We’ll also discuss both the theoretical and practical runtimes for these functions.
