In the past 20 years there has been treftlendous progress in developing and analyzing parallel algorithftls. Researchers have developed efficient parallel algorithms to solve most problems for which efficient sequential solutions are known. Although some ofthese algorithms are efficient only in a theoretical framework, many are quite efficient in practice or have key ideas that have been used in efficient implementations. This research on parallel algorithms has not only improved our general understanding ofparallelism but in several cases has led to improvements in sequential algorithms. Unf:ortunately there has been less success in developing good languages f:or prograftlftling parallel algorithftls, particularly languages that are well suited for teaching and prototyping algorithms. There has been a large gap between languages

Voronoi diagrams can also be thought of as lower envelopes, in the sense mentioned at the beginning of this subsection. Namely, for each point x not situated on a bisecting curve, the relation p x q defines a total ordering on S. If we construct a set of surfaces H p , p S,in3-space such that H p is below H q i# p x q holds, then the projection of their lower envelope equals the abstract Voronoi diagram.

. We use known data structures for ray-shooting and linear-programming queries to derive new output-sensitive results on convex hulls, extreme points, and related problems. We show that the f -face convex hull of an n-point set P in a fixed dimension d # 2 can be constructed in O(n log f + (nf) 1-1/(#d/2#+1) log O(1) n) time; this is optimal if f = O(n 1/#d/2# / log K n) for some sufficiently large constant K . We also show that the h extreme points of P can be computed in O(n log O(1) h + (nh) 1-1/(#d/2#+1) log O(1) n) time. These results are then applied to produce an algorithm that computes the vertices of all the convex layers of P in O(n 2-# ) time for any constant #<2/(#d/2# 2 + 1). Finally, we obtain improved time bounds for other problems including levels in arrangements and linear programming with few violated constraints. In all of our algorithms the input is assumed to be in general position. 1. Introduction Let P be a set of n points in d-dimen...

mesh generation, mesh coarsening, multigrid Abstract A numerical method for the solution of a partial differential equation (PDE) requires the following steps: (1) discretizing the domain (mesh generation); (2) using an approximation method and the mesh to transform the problem into a linear system; (3) solving the linear system. The approximation error and convergence of the numerical method depend on the geometric quality of the mesh, which in turn depends on the size and shape of its elements. For example, the shape quality of a triangular mesh is measured by its element's aspect ratio. In this work, we shift the focus to the geometric properties of the nodes, rather than the elements, of well shaped meshes. We introduce the concept of well-spaced points and their spacing functions, and show that these enable the development of simple and efficient algorithms for the different stages of the numerical solution of PDEs. We first apply well-spaced point sets and their accompanying technology to mesh coarsening, a crucial step in the multigrid solution of a PDE. A good aspect-ratio coarsening sequence of an unstructured mesh M0 is a sequence of good aspect-ratio meshes M1; : : : ; Mk such that Mi is an approximation of Mi\Gamma 1 containing fewer nodes and elements. We present a new approach to coarsening that guarantees the sequence is also of optimal size and width up to a constant factor-- the first coarsening method that provides these guarantees. We also present experimental results, based on an implementation of our approach, that substantiate the theoretical claims.

We present simple output-sensitive algorithms that construct the convex hull of a set of n points in two or three dimensions in worst-case optimal O(n log h) time and O(n) space, where h denotes the number of vertices of the convex hull.

A surface reconstruction algorithm takes as input a set of sample points from an unknown closed and smooth surface in 3-d space, and produces a piece-wise linear approximation of the surface that contains the sample points. Variants of this problem have received considerable attention in computer vision and computer graphics and more recently in computational geometry. In the latter area, three different algorithms (Amenta and Bern `98, and refined in Amenta, Choi, Dey and Leekha `00; Amenta, Choi and Kolluri `00; Boissonnat and Cazals `00) have been proposed. These algorithms have a correctness guarantee: if the sample is sufficiently dense then the output is a good approximation to the original surface. They have unfortunately a worst-case running time that is quadratic in the size of the input. This is so because they are based on the construction of 3-d Voronoi diagrams or Delaunay tetrahedrizations, which can have quadratic size. Even worse, according to recent work (Erickson `01), there are surfaces for which this is the case even when the sample set is "locally uniform" on the surface. In this paper, we describe a new algorithm that also has a correctness guarantee but whose worst-case running time is almost linear. In fact, O(n log n) where n is the input size. As in some of the previous algorithms, the piece-wise linear approximation produced by the new algorithm is a subset of the 3-d Delaunay tetrahedrization; however, this is obtained by computing only the relevant parts of the 3-d Delaunay structure. The algorithm first estimates for each sample point the surface normal and a parameter that is then used to "decimate" the set of samples. The resulting subset of sample points is locally uniform and so a reconstruction based on it can be compu...

The Voronoi diagram of a point set is a fundamental geometric structure that partitions the space into elementary regions of influence defining a discrete proximity graph and dually a well-shaped Delaunay triangulation. In this paper, we investigate a framework for defining and building the Voronoi diagrams for a broad class of distortion measures called Bregman divergences, that includes not only the traditional (squared) Euclidean distance, but also various divergence measures based on entropic functions. As a by-product, Bregman Voronoi diagrams allow one to define information-theoretic Voronoi diagrams in statistical parametric spaces based on the relative entropy of distributions. We show that for a given Bregman divergence, one can define several types of Voronoi diagrams related to each other

This paper describes the design and implementation of a practical parallel algorithm for Delaunay triangulation that works well on general distributions. Although there have been many theoretical parallel algorithms for the problem, and some implementations based on bucketing that work well for uniform distributions, there has been little work on implementations for general distributions. We use the well known reduction of 2D Delaunay triangulation to find the 3D convex hull of points on a paraboloid. Based on this reduction we developed a variant of the Edelsbrunner and Shi 3D convex hull algorithm, specialized for the case when the point set lies on a paraboloid. This simplification reduces the work required by the algorithm (number of operations) from O(n log^2 n) to O(n log n). The depth (parallel time) is O(log^3 n) on a CREW PRAM. The algorithm is simpler than previous O(n log n) work parallel algorithms leading to smaller constants. Initial experiments using a variety of distributions showed that our parallel algorithm was within a factor of 2 in work from the best sequential algorithm. Based on these promising results, the algorithm was implemented using C and an MPI-based toolkit. Compared with previous work, the resulting implementation achieves significantly better speedups over good sequential code, does not assume a uniform distribution of points, and is widely portable due to its use of MPI as a communication mechanism. Results are presented for the IBM SP2, Cray T3D, SGI Power Challenge, and DEC AlphaCluster.

In this paper, we give an algorithm for output-sensitive construction of an f-face convex hull of a set of n points in general position in E 4 . Our algorithm runs in O((n + f)log 2 f) time and uses O(n + f) space. This is the first algorithm within a polylogarithmic factor of optimal O(n log f + f) time over the whole range of f . By a standard lifting map, we obtain outputsensitive algorithms for the Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation in E 3 and for the portion of a Voronoi diagram that is clipped to a convex polytope. Our approach simplifies the "ultimate convex hull algorithm" of Kirkpatrick and Seidel in E 2 and also leads to improved output-sensitive results on constructing convex hulls in E d for any even constant d ? 4. 1 Introduction Geometric structures induced by n points in Euclidean d-dimensional space, such as the convex hull, Voronoi diagram, or Delaunay triangulation, can be of larger size than the point set that defines them. In many practical situat...

We show that in the worst case, &Omega;(n dd=2e\Gamma1 +n log n) sidedness queries are required to determine whether the convex hull of n points in R^d is simplicial, or to determine the number of convex hull facets. This lower bound matches known upper bounds in any odd dimension. Our result follows from a straightforward adversary argument. A key step in the proof is the construction of a quasi-simplicial n-vertex polytope with &Omega;(n dd=2e\Gamma1 ) degenerate facets. While it has been known for several years that d-dimensional convex hulls can have &Omega;(n bd=2c ) facets, the previously best lower bound for these problems is only &Omega;(n log n). Using similar techniques, we also obtain simple and correct proofs of Erickson and Seidel's lower bounds for detecting affine degeneracies in arbitrary dimensions and circular degeneracies in the plane. As a related result, we show that detecting simplicial convex hulls in R^d is &lceil;d/2&rceil;-hard, in the in the sense of Gajentaan and Overmars.