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Computing Downwards Accumulations on Trees Quickly

Jeremy Gibbons

Abstract

\em Downwards passes\/ on binary trees are essentially functions which pass information down a tree, from the root towards the leaves. Under certain conditions, a downwards pass is both `efficient' (computable in a functional style in parallel time proportional to the depth of the tree) and `manipulable' (enjoying a number of distributivity properties useful in program construction); we call a downwards pass satisfying these conditions a \em downwards accumulation. In this paper, we show that these conditions do in fact yield a stronger conclusion: the accumulation can be computed in parallel time proportional to the \em logarithm\/ of the depth of the tree, on a CREW PRAM machine.

Details

Journal

Theoretical Computer Science

Note

Earlier version appeared in Proceedings of the 16th Australian Computer Science Conference‚ Brisbane‚ 1993

Number

1

Pages

67–80

Volume

169

Year

1996

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