  We present a parallelizable algorithm for computing the persistent homology
of a filtered chain complex. Our approach differs from the commonly used
reduction algorithm by first computing persistence pairs within local chunks,
then simplifying the unpaired columns, and finally applying standard reduction
on the simplified matrix. The approach generalizes a technique by G\"unther et
al., which uses discrete Morse Theory to compute persistence; we derive the
same worst-case complexity bound in a more general context. The algorithm
employs several practical optimization techniques which are of independent
interest. Our sequential implementation of the algorithm is competitive with
state-of-the-art methods, and we improve the performance through parallelized
computation.

Algebraic Topology