Visualizing PRAM Algorithm for Mergesort

Undergraduate algorithms courses are a natural setting for teaching many of the theoretical ideas of parallel computing. Mergesort is a fundamental sequential divide-and-conquer algorithm often analyzed in such courses. In this work, we present a visualization tool to help demonstrate a novel PRAM algorithm for mergesort that is work efficient and has polylogarithmic span. Our implementation uses the Thread -Safe Graphics Library, which has an existing visualization of parallel mergesort. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has better work and span than the one currently visualized.