Asynchronous Gathering of Robots with Finite Memory on a Circle under Limited Visibility

Consider a set of $n$ mobile entities, called robots, located and operating on a continuous circle, i.e., all robots are initially in distinct locations on a circle. The \textit{gathering} problem asks to design a distributed algorithm that allows the robots to assemble at a point on the circle. Robots are anonymous, identical, and homogeneous. Robots operate in a deterministic Look-Compute-Move cycle within the circular path. Robots agree on the clockwise direction. The robot's movement is rigid and they have limited visibility $\pi$, i.e., each robot can only see the points of the circle which is at an angular distance strictly less than $\pi$ from the robot. Di Luna \textit{et al}. [DISC'2020] provided a deterministic gathering algorithm of oblivious and silent robots on a circle in semi-synchronous (\textsc{SSync}) scheduler. Buchin \textit{et al}. [IPDPS(W)'2021] showed that, under full visibility, $\mathcal{OBLOT}$ robot model with \textsc{SSync} scheduler is incomparable to $\mathcal{FSTA}$ robot (robots are silent but have finite persistent memory) model with asynchronous (\textsc{ASync}) scheduler. Under limited visibility, this comparison is still unanswered. So, this work extends the work of Di Luna \textit{et al}. [DISC'2020] under \textsc{ASync} scheduler for $\mathcal{FSTA}$ robot model

Brief announcement: 2D-stack - A scalable lock-free stack design that continuously relaxes semantics for better performance

We briefly describe an efficient lock-free concurrent stack design with tunable and tenable relaxed semantics to allow for better performance. The design is tunable and allow for a continuous monotonic trade of weaker semantics for better throughput performance. Concurrent stacks have an inherent scalability bottleneck due to their single access point for both their operations. Elimination and semantics relaxation have been proposed in the literature to address this problem. Semantics relaxation has the potential to reach monotonically very high throughput by continuously trading relaxation for throughput. Previous solutions could not fully leverage this potential. We suggest a new two dimensional design that can achieve this by exploiting disjoint access parallelism in one dimension and locality in the other within tight accuracy bounds. The behaviour of the algorithm is tightly bound. We compare experimentally to previous work, with respect to throughput and relaxed behaviour observed, on different relaxation and concurrency settings. The experimental evaluation shows that our algorithm significantly outperform all other algorithms in terms of performance, also maintain better accuracy in contrast to other designs with relaxed semantics

Circle formation by asynchronous opaque robots on infinite grid

This paper presents a distributed algorithm for circle formation problem under the infinite grid environment by asynchronous mobile opaque robots. Initially all the robots are acquiring distinct positions and they have to form a circle over the grid. Movements of the robots are restricted only along the grid lines. They do not share any global co-ordinate system. Robots are controlled by an asynchronous adversarial scheduler that operates in Look-Compute-Move cycles. The robots are indistinguishable by their nature, do not have any memory of their past configurations and previous actions. We consider the problem under luminous model, where robots communicate via lights, other than that they do not have any external communication system. Our protocol solves the  circle formation problem using seven colors. A subroutine of our algorithm also solves the line formation problem using three colors

Connectivity Lower Bounds in Broadcast Congested Clique

We prove three new lower bounds for graph connectivity in the 1-bit broadcast congested clique model, BCC(1). First, in the KT-0 version of BCC(1), in which nodes are aware of neighbors only through port numbers, we show an ?(log n) round lower bound for Connectivity even for constant-error randomized Monte Carlo algorithms. The deterministic version of this result can be obtained via the well-known "edge-crossing" argument, but, the randomized version of this result requires establishing new combinatorial results regarding the indistinguishability graph induced by inputs. In our second result, we show that the ?(log n) lower bound result extends to the KT-1 version of the BCC(1) model, in which nodes are aware of IDs of all neighbors, though our proof works only for deterministic algorithms. This result substantially improves upon the existing ?(log^* n) deterministic lower bound (Jurdzi?ski et el., SIROCCO 2018) for this problem. Since nodes know IDs of their neighbors in the KT-1 model, it is no longer possible to play "edge-crossing" tricks; instead we present a reduction from the 2-party communication complexity problem Partition in which Alice and Bob are given two set partitions on [n] and are required to determine if the join of these two set partitions equals the trivial one-part set partition. While our KT-1 Connectivity lower bound holds only for deterministic algorithms, in our third result we extend this ?(log n) KT-1 lower bound to constant-error Monte Carlo algorithms for the closely related ConnectedComponents problem. We use information-theoretic techniques to obtain this result. All our results hold for the seemingly easy special case of Connectivity in which an algorithm has to distinguish an instance with one cycle from an instance with multiple cycles. Our results showcase three rather different lower bound techniques and lay the groundwork for further improvements in lower bounds for Connectivity in the BCC(1) model

Performance Analysis and Modelling of Concurrent Multi-access Data Structures

The major impediment to scaling concurrent data structures is memory contention when accessing shared data structure access-points, leading to thread serialisation, hindering parallelism. Aiming to address this challenge, significant amount of work in the literature has proposed multi-access techniques that improve concurrent data structure parallelism. However, there is little work on analysing and modelling the execution behaviour of concurrent multi-access data structures especially in a shared memory setting. In this paper, we analyse and model the general execution behaviour of concurrent multi-access data structures in the shared memory setting. We study and analyse the behaviour of the two popular random access patterns: shared (Remote) and exclusive (Local) access, and the behaviour of the two most commonly used atomic primitives for designing lock-free data structures: Compare and Swap, and, Fetch and Add. We model the concurrent multi-accesses by splitting the thread execution procedure into five logical sessions: i) side-work, ii) access-point search iii) access-point acquisition, iv) access-point data acquisition and v) access-point data operation. We model the acquisition of an access-point, as a system of closed queuing networks with parallel servers, and data acquisition in terms of where the data is located within the memory system. We evaluate our model on a set of concurrent data structure designs including a counter, a stack and a FIFO queue. The evaluation is carried out on two state of the art multi-core processors: Intel Xeon Phi CPU 7290 with 72 physical cores and Intel Xeon E5-2695 with 14 physical cores. Our model is able to predict the throughput performance of the given concurrent data structures with 80% to 100% accuracy on both architectures

Reliable Broadcast despite Mobile Byzantine Faults

We investigate the solvability of the Byzantine Reliable Broadcast and Byzantine Broadcast Channel problems in distributed systems affected by Mobile Byzantine Faults. We show that both problems are not solvable even in one of the most constrained system models for mobile Byzantine faults defined so far. By endowing processes with an additional local failure oracle, we provide a solution to the Byzantine Broadcast Channel problem