A connection between circular colorings and periodic schedules

AbstractWe show that there is a curious connection between circular colorings of edge-weighted digraphs and periodic schedules of timed marked graphs. Circular coloring of an edge-weighted digraph was introduced by Mohar [B. Mohar, Circular colorings of edge-weighted graphs, J. Graph Theory 43 (2003) 107–116]. This kind of coloring is a very natural generalization of several well-known graph coloring problems including the usual circular coloring [X. Zhu, Circular chromatic number: A survey, Discrete Math. 229 (2001) 371–410] and the circular coloring of vertex-weighted graphs [W. Deuber, X. Zhu, Circular coloring of weighted graphs, J. Graph Theory 23 (1996) 365–376]. Timed marked graphs G→ [R.M. Karp, R.E. Miller, Properties of a model for parallel computations: Determinancy, termination, queuing, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 14 (1966) 1390–1411] are used, in computer science, to model the data movement in parallel computations, where a vertex represents a task, an arc uv with weight cuv represents a data channel with communication cost, and tokens on arc uv represent the input data of task vertex v. Dynamically, if vertex u operates at time t, then u removes one token from each of its in-arc; if uv is an out-arc of u, then at time t+cuv vertex u places one token on arc uv. Computer scientists are interested in designing, for each vertex u, a sequence of time instants {fu(1),fu(2),fu(3),…} such that vertex u starts its kth operation at time fu(k) and each in-arc of u contains at least one token at that time. The set of functions {fu:u∈V(G→)} is called a schedule of G→. Computer scientists are particularly interested in periodic schedules. Given a timed marked graph G→, they ask if there exist a period p>0 and real numbers xu such that G→ has a periodic schedule of the form fu(k)=xu+p(k−1) for each vertex u and any positive integer k. In this note we demonstrate an unexpected connection between circular colorings and periodic schedules. The aim of this note is to provide a possibility of translating problems and methods from one area of graph coloring to another area of computer science

Interleaved adjoints on directed graphs

For an integer k >= 1, the k-th interlacing adjoint of a digraph G is the digraph i_k(G) with vertex-set V(G)^k, and arcs ((u_1, ..., u_k), (v_1, ..., v_k)) such that (u_i,v_i) \in A(G) for i = 1, ..., k and (v_i, u_{i+1}) \in A(G) for i = 1, ..., k-1. For every k we derive upper and lower bounds for the chromatic number of i_k(G) in terms of that of G. In particular, we find tight bounds on the chromatic number of interlacing adjoints of transitive tournaments. We use this result in conjunction with categorial properties of adjoint functors to derive the following consequence. For every integer ell, there exists a directed path Q_{\ell} of algebraic length ell which admits homomorphisms into every directed graph of chromatic number at least 4. We discuss a possible impact of this approach on the multifactor version of the weak Hedetniemi conjecture

Simple, safe, and efficient memory management using linear pointers

Efficient and safe memory management is a hard problem. Garbage collection promises automatic memory management but comes with the cost of increased memory footprint, reduced parallelism in multi-threaded programs, unpredictable pause time, and intricate tuning parameters balancing the program's workload and designated memory usage in order for an application to perform reasonably well. Existing research mitigates the above problems to some extent, but programmer error could still cause memory leak by erroneously keeping memory references when they are no longer needed. We need a methodology for programmers to become resource aware, so that efficient, scalable, predictable and high performance programs may be written without the fear of resource leak. Linear logic has been recognized as the formalism of choice for resource tracking. It requires explicit introduction and elimination of resources and guarantees that a resource cannot be implicitly shared or abandoned, hence must be linear. Early languages based on linear logic focused on Curry-Howard correspondence. They began by limiting the expressive powers of the language and then reintroduced them by allowing controlled sharing which is necessary for recursive functions. However, only by deviating from Curry-Howard correspondence could later development actually address programming errors in resource usage. The contribution of this dissertation is a simple, safe, and efficient approach introducing linear resource ownership semantics into C++ (which is still a widely used language after 30 years since inception) through linear pointer, a smart pointer inspired by linear logic. By implementing various linear data structures and a parallel, multi-threaded memory allocator based on these data structures, this work shows that linear pointer is practical and efficient in the real world, and that it is possible to build a memory management stack that is entirely leak free. The dissertation offers some closing remarks on the difficulties a formal system would encounter when reasoning about a concurrent linear data algorithm, and what might be done to solve these problems

The Proportional Coloring Problem: Optimizing Buffers in Radio Mesh Networks

International audienceIn this paper, we consider a new edge coloring problem to model call scheduling op- timization issues in wireless mesh networks: the proportional coloring. It consists in finding a minimum cost edge coloring of a graph which preserves the propor- tion given by the weights associated to each of its edges. We show that deciding if a weighted graph admits a proportional coloring is pseudo-polynomial while de- termining its proportional chromatic index is NP-hard. We then give lower and upper bounds for this parameter that can be computed in pseudo-polynomial time. We finally identify a class of graphs and a class of weighted graphs for which the proportional chromatic index can be exactly determined