A distributed processing pipeline accelerates sorting by assigning different portions of an array to separate worker threads. Given an integer array data of length n and an integer k representing the number of available workers, return a fully sorted array containing all elements of data in ascending order. The following rules apply:

• Partition data into exactly k contiguous segments, each as evenly sized as possible. If n is not divisible by k, distribute the remainder elements across the first segments (one extra element each). ...