Parallel Addition
Parallel Addition Description While sequential addition of a set of numbers, such as the elements of an array, is well understood, the implementation of a parallel addition algorithm provides both a new set of challenges and an opportunity to use more than one core on your computer. The concept behind this parallel addition algorithm is to create several tasks, each of which reads a pair of values from the set of values to be added, performs the addition, then puts its result back into the set of values to be added. When the set of values to be added is reduced to 1 the addition is complete, and the remaining value in the set is the final total. The following figures graphically show a concept of how the algorithm works. In practice the exact pairing of values to be added may differ. That difference is not important to the result of the program because addition is commutative. Illustration 1: Initial Data Set In this example each parallel task will extract two values fro...