Work-Time Optimal k-merge Algorithms on the PRAM

The k-merge problem, given a collection of k, (2 k n), sorted sequences of total length n, asks to merge them into a new sorted sequence. The main contribution of this work is to propose simple and intuitive work-time optimal algorithms for the k-merge problem on two PRAM models. Specifically, our k-merge algorithms perform O(n log k) work and run in O(log n) time on the EREW-PRAM and in O(log log n+log k) time on the CREW-PRAM, respectively.