160,530 research outputs found
The sign problem in Monte Carlo simulations of frustrated quantum spin systems
We discuss the sign problem arising in Monte Carlo simulations of frustrated
quantum spin systems. We show that for a class of ``semi-frustrated'' systems
(Heisenberg models with ferromagnetic couplings along the -axis
and antiferromagnetic couplings in the -plane, for
arbitrary distances ) the sign problem present for algorithms operating in
the -basis can be solved within a recent ``operator-loop'' formulation of
the stochastic series expansion method (a cluster algorithm for sampling the
diagonal matrix elements of the power series expansion of
to all orders). The solution relies on identification of operator-loops which
change the configuration sign when updated (``merons'') and is similar to the
meron-cluster algorithm recently proposed by Chandrasekharan and Wiese for
solving the sign problem for a class of fermion models (Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf
83}, 3116 (1999)). Some important expectation values, e.g., the internal
energy, can be evaluated in the subspace with no merons, where the weight
function is positive definite. Calculations of other expectation values require
sampling of configurations with only a small number of merons (typically zero
or two), with an accompanying sign problem which is not serious. We also
discuss problems which arise in applying the meron concept to more general
quantum spin models with frustrated interactions.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figure
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
A Cost-based Optimizer for Gradient Descent Optimization
As the use of machine learning (ML) permeates into diverse application
domains, there is an urgent need to support a declarative framework for ML.
Ideally, a user will specify an ML task in a high-level and easy-to-use
language and the framework will invoke the appropriate algorithms and system
configurations to execute it. An important observation towards designing such a
framework is that many ML tasks can be expressed as mathematical optimization
problems, which take a specific form. Furthermore, these optimization problems
can be efficiently solved using variations of the gradient descent (GD)
algorithm. Thus, to decouple a user specification of an ML task from its
execution, a key component is a GD optimizer. We propose a cost-based GD
optimizer that selects the best GD plan for a given ML task. To build our
optimizer, we introduce a set of abstract operators for expressing GD
algorithms and propose a novel approach to estimate the number of iterations a
GD algorithm requires to converge. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic
datasets show that our optimizer not only chooses the best GD plan but also
allows for optimizations that achieve orders of magnitude performance speed-up.Comment: Accepted at SIGMOD 201
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