Count reduction using Thrust - c++

Question

Given some input keys and values, I am trying to count how many consecutive values with the same key exist. I will give an example to make this more clear.
Input keys: { 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1 }
Input values: { 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 }
Expected output keys: { 1, 4, 2, 1 }
Expected output values: { 1, 3, 2, 1 }
I am trying to solve this problem on a GPU using CUDA. The reduction capabilities of the Thrust library seemed like a good solution for this and I got to the following:
#include <thrust/reduce.h>
#include <thrust/functional.h>
struct count_functor : public thrust::binary_function<int, int, int>
{
__host__ __device__
int operator()(int input, int counter)
{
return counter + 1;
}
};
const int N = 7;
int A[N] = { 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1 }; // input keys
int B[N] = { 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 }; // input values
int C[N]; // output keys
int D[N]; // output values
thrust::pair<int*, int*> new_end;
thrust::equal_to<int> binary_pred;
count_functor binary_op;
new_end = thrust::reduce_by_key(A, A + N, B, C, D, binary_pred, binary_op);
for (int i = 0; i < new_end.first - C; i++) {
std::cout << C[i] << " - " << D[i] << "\n";
}
This code is pretty similar to an example from the Thrust documentation. However, instead of the plus operation, I am trying to count. The output from this code is the following:
1 - 9
4 - 7
2 - 5
1 - 3
However, I would expected the second column to contain the values 1, 3, 2, 1. I think the counts are off because the reduction starts with the first value it finds and does not apply the operator until it has a second value, but I am not sure this is the case.
Am I overlooking something about the reduce_by_key function that could solve this problem or should I use a completely different function to achieve what I want?

Answer 1

For your use case you don't need the values of B, the values of D are only dependent on the values of A.
In order to count how many consecutive values are in A you can supply a thrust::constant_iterator as the input values and apply thrust::reduce_by_key:
#include <thrust/reduce.h>
#include <thrust/functional.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <thrust/iterator/constant_iterator.h>
int main()
{
const int N = 7;
int A[N] = { 1, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 1 };
int C[N];
int D[N];
thrust::pair<int*, int*> new_end;
thrust::equal_to<int> binary_pred;
thrust::plus<int> binary_op;
new_end = thrust::reduce_by_key(A, A + N, thrust::make_constant_iterator(1), C, D, binary_pred, binary_op);
for (int i = 0; i < new_end.first - C; i++) {
std::cout << C[i] << " - " << D[i] << "\n";
}
return 0;
}
output
1 - 1
4 - 3
2 - 2
1 - 1