Crosslinking in parallel

A crosslink is a double link established between the two entries of an edge in an adjacency list representation of a graph. Crosslinks play important roles in several parallel algorithms as they provide constant time access between the two entries of an edge; the existence of crosslinks is usually assumed. We consider the problem of establishing crosslinks in a crosslink-less adjacency list for graphs that belong to a class of graphs called the linearly contractible graphs, and show that cross-links can be established optimally in O(log n log*n) time using a CREW PRAM and optimally in O(log n) time using a CRCW PRAM for such graphs

Capacitated Vehicle Routing with Non-Uniform Speeds

The capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) involves distributing (identical) items from a depot to a set of demand locations, using a single capacitated vehicle. We study a generalization of this problem to the setting of multiple vehicles having non-uniform speeds (that we call Heterogenous CVRP), and present a constant-factor approximation algorithm. The technical heart of our result lies in achieving a constant approximation to the following TSP variant (called Heterogenous TSP). Given a metric denoting distances between vertices, a depot r containing k vehicles with possibly different speeds, the goal is to find a tour for each vehicle (starting and ending at r), so that every vertex is covered in some tour and the maximum completion time is minimized. This problem is precisely Heterogenous CVRP when vehicles are uncapacitated. The presence of non-uniform speeds introduces difficulties for employing standard tour-splitting techniques. In order to get a better understanding of this technique in our context, we appeal to ideas from the 2-approximation for scheduling in parallel machine of Lenstra et al.. This motivates the introduction of a new approximate MST construction called Level-Prim, which is related to Light Approximate Shortest-path Trees. The last component of our algorithm involves partitioning the Level-Prim tree and matching the resulting parts to vehicles. This decomposition is more subtle than usual since now we need to enforce correlation between the size of the parts and their distances to the depot

Throughput Optimal On-Line Algorithms for Advanced Resource Reservation in Ultra High-Speed Networks

Advanced channel reservation is emerging as an important feature of ultra high-speed networks requiring the transfer of large files. Applications include scientific data transfers and database backup. In this paper, we present two new, on-line algorithms for advanced reservation, called BatchAll and BatchLim, that are guaranteed to achieve optimal throughput performance, based on multi-commodity flow arguments. Both algorithms are shown to have polynomial-time complexity and provable bounds on the maximum delay for 1+epsilon bandwidth augmented networks. The BatchLim algorithm returns the completion time of a connection immediately as a request is placed, but at the expense of a slightly looser competitive ratio than that of BatchAll. We also present a simple approach that limits the number of parallel paths used by the algorithms while provably bounding the maximum reduction factor in the transmission throughput. We show that, although the number of different paths can be exponentially large, the actual number of paths needed to approximate the flow is quite small and proportional to the number of edges in the network. Simulations for a number of topologies show that, in practice, 3 to 5 parallel paths are sufficient to achieve close to optimal performance. The performance of the competitive algorithms are also compared to a greedy benchmark, both through analysis and simulation.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Fast Mixing of Parallel Glauber Dynamics and Low-Delay CSMA Scheduling

Glauber dynamics is a powerful tool to generate randomized, approximate solutions to combinatorially difficult problems. It has been used to analyze and design distributed CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) scheduling algorithms for multi-hop wireless networks. In this paper we derive bounds on the mixing time of a generalization of Glauber dynamics where multiple links are allowed to update their states in parallel and the fugacity of each link can be different. The results can be used to prove that the average queue length (and hence, the delay) under the parallel Glauber dynamics based CSMA grows polynomially in the number of links for wireless networks with bounded-degree interference graphs when the arrival rate lies in a fraction of the capacity region. We also show that in specific network topologies, the low-delay capacity region can be further improved.Comment: 12 page

Scheduling MapReduce Jobs under Multi-Round Precedences

We consider non-preemptive scheduling of MapReduce jobs with multiple tasks in the practical scenario where each job requires several map-reduce rounds. We seek to minimize the average weighted completion time and consider scheduling on identical and unrelated parallel processors. For identical processors, we present LP-based O(1)-approximation algorithms. For unrelated processors, the approximation ratio naturally depends on the maximum number of rounds of any job. Since the number of rounds per job in typical MapReduce algorithms is a small constant, our scheduling algorithms achieve a small approximation ratio in practice. For the single-round case, we substantially improve on previously best known approximation guarantees for both identical and unrelated processors. Moreover, we conduct an experimental analysis and compare the performance of our algorithms against a fast heuristic and a lower bound on the optimal solution, thus demonstrating their promising practical performance

Parallel Batch-Dynamic Graph Connectivity

In this paper, we study batch parallel algorithms for the dynamic connectivity problem, a fundamental problem that has received considerable attention in the sequential setting. The most well known sequential algorithm for dynamic connectivity is the elegant level-set algorithm of Holm, de Lichtenberg and Thorup (HDT), which achieves $O(\log^2 n)$ amortized time per edge insertion or deletion, and $O(\log n / \log\log n)$ time per query. We design a parallel batch-dynamic connectivity algorithm that is work-efficient with respect to the HDT algorithm for small batch sizes, and is asymptotically faster when the average batch size is sufficiently large. Given a sequence of batched updates, where $\Delta$ is the average batch size of all deletions, our algorithm achieves $O(\log n \log(1 + n / \Delta))$ expected amortized work per edge insertion and deletion and $O(\log^3 n)$ depth w.h.p. Our algorithm answers a batch of $k$ connectivity queries in $O(k \log(1 + n/k))$ expected work and $O(\log n)$ depth w.h.p. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first parallel batch-dynamic algorithm for connectivity.Comment: This is the full version of the paper appearing in the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 201