Multipacket Selection on Mesh-Connected Processor Arrays

The authors show efficient, deterministic algorithms for selection on the mesh-connected processor array, in the case when there are several elements at every processor. In particular, on a p-processor mesh, with N or=p elements, stored N/p at every processor, they show that selection can be performed in O(min(plog/sup N///sub p/, max(N/p/sup 2/3/, square root p))) communication steps. The best previously known results were based on sorting and required O(N/ square root p) communication steps, for N>or=p.