New designs for priority queue machine

Two novel designs for performing a group of priority queue operations on a set of elements are presented. Processors in either design are connected together to form a linear chain. The first machine, called a binary heap machine, is based on a heap data structure. The algorithms for XMAX and INSERT operations are different from their sequential counterparts in that they both perform the restructuring process from the top. The second machine is called a banyan heap machine. The algorithms for this machine are the generalization of heap algorithms to a more general acyclic graph called a banyan. This design requires fewer processors than the heap machine in order to meet the same capacity requirement, and unlike some of the existing designs, processors do not have geometrically varying memory sizes, resulting in a completely homogeneous system. The key advantage of the banyan heap machine is that it is possible to retrieve elements at different percentile levels