Parallel Computation of Standard Competition Rankings over a Sorted Array

The Standard Competition Ranking (SCR) is a commonly adopted ranking strategy and has been used in a wide range of applications, such as statistics, text mining, image processing, and so on. Though the sequential implementation of the SCR can be executed in linear time, it is not straightforward to design parallel algorithms for the SCR. In this paper, our focus is on the novel use of the parallel prefix computation method for calculating the SCR on a many-core Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We also design a pthreads-based algorithm on a multi-core CPU which adopts a modified binary search to find the first item’s rank in each partitioned segment. By integrating the modified binary search with the prefix computation, we later design and implement a more efficient hybrid algorithm on the GPU. The experimental results show that, as compared with the sequential execution on the CPU, our pthreads-based algorithm on a 12-core CPU can be roughly 8 times faster, while the hybrid algorithm on the GPU can achieve more than two orders of magnitude speedup.