102,662 research outputs found
Analysis of the Failure Tolerance of Linear Access Networks
In this paper, we study the disconnection of a moving vehicle from a linear access network composed by cheap WiFi Access Points in the context of the telecommuting in massive transportation systems. In concrete, we analyze the probability for a user to experience a disconnection longer than a threshold tâ, leading to a disruption of all on-going communications between the vehicle and the infrastructure network. We provide an approximation formula to estimate this probability for large networks. We then carry out a sensitivity analysis and supply a guide for operators when choosing the parameters of the networks. We focus on two scenarios: an intercity bus and an intercity train. Last, we show that such systems are viable, as they attain a very low probability of long disconnections with a very low maintenance cost
Resource efficient redundancy using quorum-based cycle routing in optical networks
In this paper we propose a cycle redundancy technique that provides optical
networks almost fault-tolerant point-to-point and multipoint-to-multipoint
communications. The technique more importantly is shown to approximately halve
the necessary light-trail resources in the network while maintaining the
fault-tolerance and dependability expected from cycle-based routing. For
efficiency and distributed control, it is common in distributed systems and
algorithms to group nodes into intersecting sets referred to as quorum sets.
Optimal communication quorum sets forming optical cycles based on light-trails
have been shown to flexibly and efficiently route both point-to-point and
multipoint-to-multipoint traffic requests. Commonly cycle routing techniques
will use pairs of cycles to achieve both routing and fault-tolerance, which
uses substantial resources and creates the potential for underutilization.
Instead, we intentionally utilize redundancy within the quorum cycles for
fault-tolerance such that almost every point-to-point communication occurs in
more than one cycle. The result is a set of cycles with 96.60% - 99.37% fault
coverage, while using 42.9% - 47.18% fewer resources.Comment: 17th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks
(ICTON), 5-9 July 2015. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1608.05172, arXiv:1608.0516
On The Robustness of a Neural Network
With the development of neural networks based machine learning and their
usage in mission critical applications, voices are rising against the
\textit{black box} aspect of neural networks as it becomes crucial to
understand their limits and capabilities. With the rise of neuromorphic
hardware, it is even more critical to understand how a neural network, as a
distributed system, tolerates the failures of its computing nodes, neurons, and
its communication channels, synapses. Experimentally assessing the robustness
of neural networks involves the quixotic venture of testing all the possible
failures, on all the possible inputs, which ultimately hits a combinatorial
explosion for the first, and the impossibility to gather all the possible
inputs for the second.
In this paper, we prove an upper bound on the expected error of the output
when a subset of neurons crashes. This bound involves dependencies on the
network parameters that can be seen as being too pessimistic in the average
case. It involves a polynomial dependency on the Lipschitz coefficient of the
neurons activation function, and an exponential dependency on the depth of the
layer where a failure occurs. We back up our theoretical results with
experiments illustrating the extent to which our prediction matches the
dependencies between the network parameters and robustness. Our results show
that the robustness of neural networks to the average crash can be estimated
without the need to neither test the network on all failure configurations, nor
access the training set used to train the network, both of which are
practically impossible requirements.Comment: 36th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems 26
- 29 September 2017. Hong Kong, Chin
Resilient Quantum Computation: Error Models and Thresholds
Recent research has demonstrated that quantum computers can solve certain
types of problems substantially faster than the known classical algorithms.
These problems include factoring integers and certain physics simulations.
Practical quantum computation requires overcoming the problems of environmental
noise and operational errors, problems which appear to be much more severe than
in classical computation due to the inherent fragility of quantum
superpositions involving many degrees of freedom. Here we show that arbitrarily
accurate quantum computations are possible provided that the error per
operation is below a threshold value. The result is obtained by combining
quantum error-correction, fault tolerant state recovery, fault tolerant
encoding of operations and concatenation. It holds under physically realistic
assumptions on the errors.Comment: 19 pages in RevTex, many figures, the paper is also avalaible at
http://qso.lanl.gov/qc
Windows .NET Network Distributed Basic Local Alignment Search Toolkit (W.ND-BLAST)
BACKGROUND: BLAST is one of the most common and useful tools for Genetic Research. This paper describes a software application we have termed Windows .NET Distributed Basic Local Alignment Search Toolkit (W.ND-BLAST), which enhances the BLAST utility by improving usability, fault recovery, and scalability in a Windows desktop environment. Our goal was to develop an easy to use, fault tolerant, high-throughput BLAST solution that incorporates a comprehensive BLAST result viewer with curation and annotation functionality. RESULTS: W.ND-BLAST is a comprehensive Windows-based software toolkit that targets researchers, including those with minimal computer skills, and provides the ability increase the performance of BLAST by distributing BLAST queries to any number of Windows based machines across local area networks (LAN). W.ND-BLAST provides intuitive Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) for BLAST database creation, BLAST execution, BLAST output evaluation and BLAST result exportation. This software also provides several layers of fault tolerance and fault recovery to prevent loss of data if nodes or master machines fail. This paper lays out the functionality of W.ND-BLAST. W.ND-BLAST displays close to 100% performance efficiency when distributing tasks to 12 remote computers of the same performance class. A high throughput BLAST job which took 662.68 minutes (11 hours) on one average machine was completed in 44.97 minutes when distributed to 17 nodes, which included lower performance class machines. Finally, there is a comprehensive high-throughput BLAST Output Viewer (BOV) and Annotation Engine components, which provides comprehensive exportation of BLAST hits to text files, annotated fasta files, tables, or association files. CONCLUSION: W.ND-BLAST provides an interactive tool that allows scientists to easily utilizing their available computing resources for high throughput and comprehensive sequence analyses. The install package for W.ND-BLAST is freely downloadable from . With registration the software is free, installation, networking, and usage instructions are provided as well as a support forum
- âŠ