ParGeo: A Library for Parallel Computational Geometry

TL;DR

ParGeo is a multicore library offering new parallel algorithms and data structures for computational geometry, significantly accelerating tasks like convex hulls, smallest enclosing balls, and dynamic k-d trees.

Contribution

The paper introduces novel parallel algorithms for convex hulls, smallest enclosing balls, and dynamic k-d trees, with implementations demonstrating substantial speedups over sequential methods.

Findings

Up to 44.7x speedup for convex hull algorithms.

Up to 27.1x speedup for smallest enclosing ball algorithms.

Up to 46.1x speedup for BDL-tree operations.

Abstract

This paper presents ParGeo, a multicore library for computational geometry. ParGeo contains modules for fundamental tasks including $k$d-tree based spatial search, spatial graph generation, and algorithms in computational geometry. We focus on three new algorithmic contributions provided in the library. First, we present a new parallel convex hull algorithm based on a reservation technique to enable parallel modifications to the hull. We also provide the first parallel implementations of the randomized incremental convex hull algorithm as well as a divide-and-conquer convex hull algorithm in $\mathbb{R}^3$. Second, for the smallest enclosing ball problem, we propose a new sampling-based algorithm to quickly reduce the size of the data set. We also provide the first parallel implementation of Welzl's classic algorithm for smallest enclosing ball. Third, we present the BDL-tree, a parallel batch-dynamic $k$d-tree that allows for efficient parallel updates and $k$-NN queries over dynamically changing point sets. BDL-trees consist of a log-structured set of $k$d-trees which can be used to efficiently insert, delete, and query batches of points in parallel. On 36 cores with two-way hyper-threading, our fastest convex hull algorithm achieves up to 44.7x self-relative parallel speedup and up to 559x speedup against the best existing sequential implementation. Our smallest enclosing ball algorithm using our sampling-based algorithm achieves up to 27.1x self-relative parallel speedup and up to 178x speedup against the best existing sequential implementation. Our implementation of the BDL-tree achieves self-relative parallel speedup of up to 46.1x. Across all of the algorithms in ParGeo, we achieve self-relative parallel speedup of 8.1--46.61x.