Randomized Incremental Convex Hull is Highly Parallel

Abstract

The randomized incremental convex hull algorithm is one of the most practical and important geometric algorithms in the literature. Due to its simplicity, and the fact that many points or facets can be added independently, it is also widely used in parallel convex hull implementations. However, to date there have been no non-trivial theoretical bounds on the parallelism available in these implementations. In this paper, we provide a strong theoretical analysis showing that the standard incremental algorithm is inherently parallel. In particular, we show that for n points in any constant dimension, the algorithm has O(log n) dependence depth with high probability. This leads to a simple work-optimal parallel algorithm with polylogarithmic span with high probability. Our key technical contribution is a new definition and analysis of the configuration dependence graph extending the traditional configuration space, which allows for asynchrony in adding configurations. To capture the "true" dependence between configurations, we define the support set of configuration c to be the set of already added configurations that it depends on. We show that for problems where the size of the support set can be bounded by a constant, the depth of the configuration dependence graph is shallow (O(log n) with high probability for input size n). In addition to convex hull, our approach also extends to several related problems, including half-space intersection and finding the intersection of a set of unit circles. We believe that the configuration dependence graph and its analysis is a general idea that could potentially be applied to more problems.