471,519 research outputs found
Approximate Data Structures with Applications
In this paper we introduce the notion of approximate
data structures, in which a small amount of error is
tolerated in the output. Approximate data structures
trade error of approximation for faster operation, leading to theoretical and practical speedups for a wide variety of algorithms. We give approximate variants of the van Emde Boas data structure, which support the same dynamic operations as the standard van Emde Boas data structure [28, 201, except that answers to queries are approximate. The variants support all operations in constant time provided the error of approximation is l/polylog(n), and in O(loglog n) time provided the error
is l/polynomial(n), for n elements in the data structure.
We consider the tolerance of prototypical algorithms to approximate data structures. We study in particular Prim’s minimumspanning tree algorithm, Dijkstra’s single-source shortest paths algorithm, and an on-line variant of Graham’s convex hull algorithm. To obtain output which approximates the desired output
with the error of approximation tending to zero, Prim’s algorithm requires only linear time, Dijkstra’s algorithm requires O(mloglogn) time, and the on-line variant of Graham’s algorithm requires constant amortized time per operation
Exchange-energy functionals for finite two-dimensional systems
Implicit and explicit density functionals for the exchange energy in finite
two-dimensional systems are developed following the approach of Becke and
Roussel [Phys. Rev. A 39, 3761 (1989)]. Excellent agreement for the
exchange-hole potentials and exchange energies is found when compared with the
exact-exchange reference data for the two-dimensional uniform electron gas and
few-electron quantum dots, respectively. Thereby, this work significantly
improves the availability of approximate density functionals for dealing with
electrons in quasi-two-dimensional structures, which have various applications
in semiconductor nanotechnology.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
A Massively Parallel Algorithm for the Approximate Calculation of Inverse p-th Roots of Large Sparse Matrices
We present the submatrix method, a highly parallelizable method for the
approximate calculation of inverse p-th roots of large sparse symmetric
matrices which are required in different scientific applications. We follow the
idea of Approximate Computing, allowing imprecision in the final result in
order to be able to utilize the sparsity of the input matrix and to allow
massively parallel execution. For an n x n matrix, the proposed algorithm
allows to distribute the calculations over n nodes with only little
communication overhead. The approximate result matrix exhibits the same
sparsity pattern as the input matrix, allowing for efficient reuse of allocated
data structures.
We evaluate the algorithm with respect to the error that it introduces into
calculated results, as well as its performance and scalability. We demonstrate
that the error is relatively limited for well-conditioned matrices and that
results are still valuable for error-resilient applications like
preconditioning even for ill-conditioned matrices. We discuss the execution
time and scaling of the algorithm on a theoretical level and present a
distributed implementation of the algorithm using MPI and OpenMP. We
demonstrate the scalability of this implementation by running it on a
high-performance compute cluster comprised of 1024 CPU cores, showing a speedup
of 665x compared to single-threaded execution
Brief Announcement: Massively Parallel Approximate Distance Sketches
Data structures that allow efficient distance estimation have been extensively studied both in centralized models and classical distributed models. We initiate their study in newer (and arguably more realistic) models of distributed computation: the Congested Clique model and the Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) model. In MPC we give two main results: an algorithm that constructs stretch/space optimal distance sketches but takes a (small) polynomial number of rounds, and an algorithm that constructs distance sketches with worse stretch but that only takes polylogarithmic rounds. Along the way, we show that other useful combinatorial structures can also be computed in MPC. In particular, one key component we use is an MPC construction of the hopsets of Elkin and Neiman (2016). This result has additional applications such as the first polylogarithmic time algorithm for constant approximate single-source shortest paths for weighted graphs in the low memory MPC setting
Latent Gaussian modeling and INLA: A review with focus on space-time applications
Bayesian hierarchical models with latent Gaussian layers have proven very
flexible in capturing complex stochastic behavior and hierarchical structures
in high-dimensional spatial and spatio-temporal data. Whereas simulation-based
Bayesian inference through Markov Chain Monte Carlo may be hampered by slow
convergence and numerical instabilities, the inferential framework of
Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) is capable to provide accurate
and relatively fast analytical approximations to posterior quantities of
interest. It heavily relies on the use of Gauss-Markov dependence structures to
avoid the numerical bottleneck of high-dimensional nonsparse matrix
computations. With a view towards space-time applications, we here review the
principal theoretical concepts, model classes and inference tools within the
INLA framework. Important elements to construct space-time models are certain
spatial Mat\'ern-like Gauss-Markov random fields, obtained as approximate
solutions to a stochastic partial differential equation. Efficient
implementation of statistical inference tools for a large variety of models is
available through the INLA package of the R software. To showcase the practical
use of R-INLA and to illustrate its principal commands and syntax, a
comprehensive simulation experiment is presented using simulated non Gaussian
space-time count data with a first-order autoregressive dependence structure in
time
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