Question

Anyone know how to implement binomial coefficient calculation in parallel ?
Any resource for multi-core or CUDA would be helpful, thank you.

Answer 1

I would start off by doing the following.

• Create an array of size (n + 1) and fill it with 1, 1, 2, 3, …. n.
• Perform an inclusive scan on this array with a product operation. At
  this point you will have array[n] = n!. i.e. array[0] = 0!, array1
  = 1! array[100] = 100! and so on.
• Now that you have every factorial from 0! to n!, you can perform (n! / p! * (n – p)!) very easily.

The first and the last operations may need custom kernels. The second operation can be done using thrust and the inclusive_scan operation.

EDIT

As for the drawbacks, as mentioned above in the comments, there will be precison issues even with 64 bit integers at reasonable large size of n. But this is the basic algorithm that you would need to use.