Limits on the power of concurrent-write parallel machines (Q1103403)

The computation of specific functions using the most general form of concurrent-read-concurrent-write parallel RAM is considered. It is shown that such a machine can compute any function of Boolean inputs in time log n-\(\log \log n+O(1)\) given a polynomial number of processors and memory cells and that this bound is tight for integer addition. Despite this evidence of the power of the model we show that a very simple function, namely parity, requires time \(\Omega\) (\(\sqrt{\log n})\) to compute given a polynomial bound on the number of processors, independent of the number of memory cells.