209,704 research outputs found
The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary
Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established
model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of
hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and
business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is
reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a
sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration.
The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is
one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification.
Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and the
currently best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of
Leroux and Schmitz from LICS 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound,
i.e. that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and
space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to
Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several
reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than
the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous
but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s.
Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic,
concurrent systems, process calculi and other areas, that are known to admit
reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary.
Thirdly, it makes obsolete the currently best lower bounds for the reachability
problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a
pushdown stack.Comment: Final version of STOC'1
IVOA Recommendation: Resource Metadata for the Virtual Observatory Version 1.12
An essential capability of the Virtual Observatory is a means for describing
what data and computational facilities are available where, and once
identified, how to use them. The data themselves have associated metadata
(e.g., FITS keywords), and similarly we require metadata about data collections
and data services so that VO users can easily find information of interest.
Furthermore, such metadata are needed in order to manage distributed queries
efficiently; if a user is interested in finding x-ray images there is no point
in querying the HST archive, for example. In this document we suggest an
architecture for resource and service metadata and describe the relationship of
this architecture to emerging Web Services standards. We also define an initial
set of metadata concepts
Bookmarklet Builder for Offline Data Retrieval
Bookmarklet Builder for Offline Data Retrieval is a computer application which will allow users to view websites even when they are offline. It can be stored as a URL of a bookmark in the browser. Bookmarklets exist for storing single web pages in hand-held devices and these web pages are stored as PDF files. In this project we have developed a tool that can save entire web page applications as bookmarklets. This will enable users to use these applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The main technology beyond Javascript used to achieve this is the data: URI scheme. With the data: URI scheme we can embed images, Flash, applets, PDFs, etc. as base64 encoded text within a web page. This URI scheme is supported by all major browsers and in Internet Explorer from version 8 onwards. The application could be made available online, to users who are typically website owners and would like to allow their users to be able to view their websites offline.
Fast polynomial evaluation and composition
The library \emph{fast\_polynomial} for Sage compiles multivariate
polynomials for subsequent fast evaluation. Several evaluation schemes are
handled, such as H\"orner, divide and conquer and new ones can be added easily.
Notably, a new scheme is introduced that improves the classical divide and
conquer scheme when the number of terms is not a pure power of two. Natively,
the library handles polynomials over gmp big integers, boost intervals, python
numeric types. And any type that supports addition and multiplication can
extend the library thanks to the template design. Finally, the code is
parallelized for the divide and conquer schemes, and memory allocation is
localized and optimized for the different evaluation schemes. This extended
abstract presents the concepts behind the \emph{fast\_polynomial} library. The
sage package can be downloaded at
\url{http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/13358}
The XENON1T Data Distribution and Processing Scheme
The XENON experiment is looking for non-baryonic particle dark matter in the
universe. The setup is a dual phase time projection chamber (TPC) filled with
3200 kg of ultra-pure liquid xenon. The setup is operated at the Laboratori
Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy. We present a full overview of the
computing scheme for data distribution and job management in XENON1T. The
software package Rucio, which is developed by the ATLAS collaboration,
facilitates data handling on Open Science Grid (OSG) and European Grid
Infrastructure (EGI) storage systems. A tape copy at the Center for High
Performance Computing (PDC) is managed by the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).
Data reduction and Monte Carlo production are handled by CI Connect which is
integrated into the OSG network. The job submission system connects resources
at the EGI, OSG, SDSC's Comet, and the campus HPC resources for distributed
computing. The previous success in the XENON1T computing scheme is also the
starting point for its successor experiment XENONnT, which starts to take data
in autumn 2019.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, CHEP 2018 proceeding
Show me the data: the pilot UK Research Data Registry
The UK Research Data (Metadata) Registry pilot project is implementing a prototype registry for the UK's research data assets, enabling the holdings of subject-based data centres and institutional data repositories alike to be searched from a single location. The purpose of the prototype is to prove the concept of the registry and uncover challenges that will need to be addressed if and when the registry is developed into a sustainable service. The prototype is being tested using metadata records harvested from nine UK data centres and the data repositories of nine UK universities
The NASA Astrophysics Data System: Architecture
The powerful discovery capabilities available in the ADS bibliographic
services are possible thanks to the design of a flexible search and retrieval
system based on a relational database model. Bibliographic records are stored
as a corpus of structured documents containing fielded data and metadata, while
discipline-specific knowledge is segregated in a set of files independent of
the bibliographic data itself.
The creation and management of links to both internal and external resources
associated with each bibliography in the database is made possible by
representing them as a set of document properties and their attributes.
To improve global access to the ADS data holdings, a number of mirror sites
have been created by cloning the database contents and software on a variety of
hardware and software platforms.
The procedures used to create and manage the database and its mirrors have
been written as a set of scripts that can be run in either an interactive or
unsupervised fashion.
The ADS can be accessed at http://adswww.harvard.eduComment: 25 pages, 8 figures, 3 table
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