2,006 research outputs found
Tribes Is Hard in the Message Passing Model
We consider the point-to-point message passing model of communication in
which there are processors with individual private inputs, each -bit
long. Each processor is located at the node of an underlying undirected graph
and has access to private random coins. An edge of the graph is a private
channel of communication between its endpoints. The processors have to compute
a given function of all their inputs by communicating along these channels.
While this model has been widely used in distributed computing, strong lower
bounds on the amount of communication needed to compute simple functions have
just begun to appear. In this work, we prove a tight lower bound of
on the communication needed for computing the Tribes function,
when the underlying graph is a star of nodes that has leaves with
inputs and a center with no input. Lower bound on this topology easily implies
comparable bounds for others. Our lower bounds are obtained by building upon
the recent information theoretic techniques of Braverman et.al (FOCS'13) and
combining it with the earlier work of Jayram, Kumar and Sivakumar (STOC'03).
This approach yields information complexity bounds that is of independent
interest
A Call to Arms: Revisiting Database Design
Good database design is crucial to obtain a sound, consistent database, and -
in turn - good database design methodologies are the best way to achieve the
right design. These methodologies are taught to most Computer Science
undergraduates, as part of any Introduction to Database class. They can be
considered part of the "canon", and indeed, the overall approach to database
design has been unchanged for years. Moreover, none of the major database
research assessments identify database design as a strategic research
direction.
Should we conclude that database design is a solved problem?
Our thesis is that database design remains a critical unsolved problem.
Hence, it should be the subject of more research. Our starting point is the
observation that traditional database design is not used in practice - and if
it were used it would result in designs that are not well adapted to current
environments. In short, database design has failed to keep up with the times.
In this paper, we put forth arguments to support our viewpoint, analyze the
root causes of this situation and suggest some avenues of research.Comment: Removed spurious column break. Nothing else was change
The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus
This paper presents a simple framework unifying a family of consensus algorithms that can tolerate process crash failures and asynchronous periods of the network, also called indulgent consensus algorithms. Key to the framework is a new abstraction we introduce here, called Alpha, and which precisely captures consensus safety. Implementations of Alpha in shared memory, storage area network, message passing and active disk systems are presented, leading to directly derived consensus algorithms suited to these communication media. The paper also considers the case where the number of processes is unknown and can be arbitrarily larg
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