24,235 research outputs found
Synchronous Counting and Computational Algorithm Design
Consider a complete communication network on nodes, each of which is a
state machine. In synchronous 2-counting, the nodes receive a common clock
pulse and they have to agree on which pulses are "odd" and which are "even". We
require that the solution is self-stabilising (reaching the correct operation
from any initial state) and it tolerates Byzantine failures (nodes that
send arbitrary misinformation). Prior algorithms are expensive to implement in
hardware: they require a source of random bits or a large number of states.
This work consists of two parts. In the first part, we use computational
techniques (often known as synthesis) to construct very compact deterministic
algorithms for the first non-trivial case of . While no algorithm exists
for , we show that as few as 3 states per node are sufficient for all
values . Moreover, the problem cannot be solved with only 2 states per
node for , but there is a 2-state solution for all values .
In the second part, we develop and compare two different approaches for
synthesising synchronous counting algorithms. Both approaches are based on
casting the synthesis problem as a propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem
and employing modern SAT-solvers. The difference lies in how to solve the SAT
problem: either in a direct fashion, or incrementally within a counter-example
guided abstraction refinement loop. Empirical results suggest that the former
technique is more efficient if we want to synthesise time-optimal algorithms,
while the latter technique discovers non-optimal algorithms more quickly.Comment: 35 pages, extended and revised versio
System Description for a Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Distributed Garbage Collector
We describe an efficient and fault-tolerant algorithm for distributed cyclic
garbage collection. The algorithm imposes few requirements on the local
machines and allows for flexibility in the choice of local collector and
distributed acyclic garbage collector to use with it. We have emphasized
reducing the number and size of network messages without sacrificing the
promptness of collection throughout the algorithm. Our proposed collector is a
variant of back tracing to avoid extensive synchronization between machines. We
have added an explicit forward tracing stage to the standard back tracing stage
and designed a tuned heuristic to reduce the total amount of work done by the
collector. Of particular note is the development of fault-tolerant cooperation
between traces and a heuristic that aggressively reduces the set of suspect
objects.Comment: 47 pages, LaTe
Lock-Free and Practical Deques using Single-Word Compare-And-Swap
We present an efficient and practical lock-free implementation of a
concurrent deque that is disjoint-parallel accessible and uses atomic
primitives which are available in modern computer systems. Previously known
lock-free algorithms of deques are either based on non-available atomic
synchronization primitives, only implement a subset of the functionality, or
are not designed for disjoint accesses. Our algorithm is based on a doubly
linked list, and only requires single-word compare-and-swap atomic primitives,
even for dynamic memory sizes. We have performed an empirical study using full
implementations of the most efficient algorithms of lock-free deques known. For
systems with low concurrency, the algorithm by Michael shows the best
performance. However, as our algorithm is designed for disjoint accesses, it
performs significantly better on systems with high concurrency and non-uniform
memory architecture
Numerical homotopies to compute generic points on positive dimensional algebraic sets
Many applications modeled by polynomial systems have positive dimensional
solution components (e.g., the path synthesis problems for four-bar mechanisms)
that are challenging to compute numerically by homotopy continuation methods. A
procedure of A. Sommese and C. Wampler consists in slicing the components with
linear subspaces in general position to obtain generic points of the components
as the isolated solutions of an auxiliary system. Since this requires the
solution of a number of larger overdetermined systems, the procedure is
computationally expensive and also wasteful because many solution paths
diverge. In this article an embedding of the original polynomial system is
presented, which leads to a sequence of homotopies, with solution paths leading
to generic points of all components as the isolated solutions of an auxiliary
system. The new procedure significantly reduces the number of paths to
solutions that need to be followed. This approach has been implemented and
applied to various polynomial systems, such as the cyclic n-roots problem
Estimation under group actions: recovering orbits from invariants
Motivated by geometric problems in signal processing, computer vision, and
structural biology, we study a class of orbit recovery problems where we
observe very noisy copies of an unknown signal, each acted upon by a random
element of some group (such as Z/p or SO(3)). The goal is to recover the orbit
of the signal under the group action in the high-noise regime. This generalizes
problems of interest such as multi-reference alignment (MRA) and the
reconstruction problem in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). We obtain
matching lower and upper bounds on the sample complexity of these problems in
high generality, showing that the statistical difficulty is intricately
determined by the invariant theory of the underlying symmetry group.
In particular, we determine that for cryo-EM with noise variance
and uniform viewing directions, the number of samples required scales as
. We match this bound with a novel algorithm for ab initio
reconstruction in cryo-EM, based on invariant features of degree at most 3. We
further discuss how to recover multiple molecular structures from heterogeneous
cryo-EM samples.Comment: 54 pages. This version contains a number of new result
On the Exact Evaluation of Certain Instances of the Potts Partition Function by Quantum Computers
We present an efficient quantum algorithm for the exact evaluation of either
the fully ferromagnetic or anti-ferromagnetic q-state Potts partition function
Z for a family of graphs related to irreducible cyclic codes. This problem is
related to the evaluation of the Jones and Tutte polynomials. We consider the
connection between the weight enumerator polynomial from coding theory and Z
and exploit the fact that there exists a quantum algorithm for efficiently
estimating Gauss sums in order to obtain the weight enumerator for a certain
class of linear codes. In this way we demonstrate that for a certain class of
sparse graphs, which we call Irreducible Cyclic Cocycle Code (ICCC_\epsilon)
graphs, quantum computers provide a polynomial speed up in the difference
between the number of edges and vertices of the graph, and an exponential speed
up in q, over the best classical algorithms known to date
Enumerating Subgraph Instances Using Map-Reduce
The theme of this paper is how to find all instances of a given "sample"
graph in a larger "data graph," using a single round of map-reduce. For the
simplest sample graph, the triangle, we improve upon the best known such
algorithm. We then examine the general case, considering both the communication
cost between mappers and reducers and the total computation cost at the
reducers. To minimize communication cost, we exploit the techniques of (Afrati
and Ullman, TKDE 2011)for computing multiway joins (evaluating conjunctive
queries) in a single map-reduce round. Several methods are shown for
translating sample graphs into a union of conjunctive queries with as few
queries as possible. We also address the matter of optimizing computation cost.
Many serial algorithms are shown to be "convertible," in the sense that it is
possible to partition the data graph, explore each partition in a separate
reducer, and have the total computation cost at the reducers be of the same
order as the computation cost of the serial algorithm.Comment: 37 page
- …