A processor may include a plurality of processing elements and a hardware accelerator for selecting data elements. The hardware accelerator may: access an input data set comprising a set of data elements, each data element having a score value; increment bin counters based on the score values of the set of data elements, each bin counter to count a number of data elements with an associated score value; determine a cumulative sum of count values for a sequence of bin counters, the sequence beginning with a first bin counter of the plurality of bin counters; identify a second bin counter in the sequence of bin counters at which the cumulative sum reaches a selection quantity N; and generate an output data set based on a comparison of the set of data elements to a threshold score associated with the second bin counter.