Efficient Sampling of Random Permutations

Abstract : We show how to uniformly distribute data at random (not to be confounded with permutation routing) in two settings that are able to deal with massive data: coarse grained parallelism and external memory. In contrast to previously known work for parallel setups, our method is able to fulfill the three criteria of uniformity, work-optimality and balance among the processors simultaneously. To guarantee the uniformity we investigate the matrix of communication requests between the processors. We show that its distribution is a generalization of the multivariate hypergeometric distribution and we give algorithms to sample it efficiently in the two settings.