1,421 research outputs found
Intercultural Polylogues in Philosophy
Statement to Panel "Intercultural Dialogue", 29th Wittgenstein-Conference of the ALWS
Kirchberg am Wechsel, August 11th 2006. Other statements, in the order of contribution, have
been given by: Mohammed Shomali (Qom, Iran), Patrick Riordan SJ (London, UK), and
Eveline Goodman-Thau (Jerusalem, Israel)
Since this is a conference of philosophers about philosophy and matters relevant to
philosophy, I shall not talk about intercultural dialogues in general, nor will I speak about
dialogues in the fields of religion or culture (fields which have to be distinguished, by the
way), dialogues between politicians, etc. My statement will try to concentrate on
intercultural dialogues in philosophy. This means, according to my understanding of
"philosophy", that I have in mind essentially dialogues on ontological, on epistemological,
or on normative questions
Configurable Strategies for Work-stealing
Work-stealing systems are typically oblivious to the nature of the tasks they
are scheduling. For instance, they do not know or take into account how long a
task will take to execute or how many subtasks it will spawn. Moreover, the
actual task execution order is typically determined by the underlying task
storage data structure, and cannot be changed. There are thus possibilities for
optimizing task parallel executions by providing information on specific tasks
and their preferred execution order to the scheduling system.
We introduce scheduling strategies to enable applications to dynamically
provide hints to the task-scheduling system on the nature of specific tasks.
Scheduling strategies can be used to independently control both local task
execution order as well as steal order. In contrast to conventional scheduling
policies that are normally global in scope, strategies allow the scheduler to
apply optimizations on individual tasks. This flexibility greatly improves
composability as it allows the scheduler to apply different, specific
scheduling choices for different parts of applications simultaneously. We
present a number of benchmarks that highlight diverse, beneficial effects that
can be achieved with scheduling strategies. Some benchmarks (branch-and-bound,
single-source shortest path) show that prioritization of tasks can reduce the
total amount of work compared to standard work-stealing execution order. For
other benchmarks (triangle strip generation) qualitatively better results can
be achieved in shorter time. Other optimizations, such as dynamic merging of
tasks or stealing of half the work, instead of half the tasks, are also shown
to improve performance. Composability is demonstrated by examples that combine
different strategies, both within the same kernel (prefix sum) as well as when
scheduling multiple kernels (prefix sum and unbalanced tree search)
The Lock-free -LSM Relaxed Priority Queue
Priority queues are data structures which store keys in an ordered fashion to
allow efficient access to the minimal (maximal) key. Priority queues are
essential for many applications, e.g., Dijkstra's single-source shortest path
algorithm, branch-and-bound algorithms, and prioritized schedulers.
Efficient multiprocessor computing requires implementations of basic data
structures that can be used concurrently and scale to large numbers of threads
and cores. Lock-free data structures promise superior scalability by avoiding
blocking synchronization primitives, but the \emph{delete-min} operation is an
inherent scalability bottleneck in concurrent priority queues. Recent work has
focused on alleviating this obstacle either by batching operations, or by
relaxing the requirements to the \emph{delete-min} operation.
We present a new, lock-free priority queue that relaxes the \emph{delete-min}
operation so that it is allowed to delete \emph{any} of the smallest
keys, where is a runtime configurable parameter. Additionally, the
behavior is identical to a non-relaxed priority queue for items added and
removed by the same thread. The priority queue is built from a logarithmic
number of sorted arrays in a way similar to log-structured merge-trees. We
experimentally compare our priority queue to recent state-of-the-art lock-free
priority queues, both with relaxed and non-relaxed semantics, showing high
performance and good scalability of our approach.Comment: Short version as ACM PPoPP'15 poste
Data Structures for Task-based Priority Scheduling
Many task-parallel applications can benefit from attempting to execute tasks
in a specific order, as for instance indicated by priorities associated with
the tasks. We present three lock-free data structures for priority scheduling
with different trade-offs on scalability and ordering guarantees. First we
propose a basic extension to work-stealing that provides good scalability, but
cannot provide any guarantees for task-ordering in-between threads. Next, we
present a centralized priority data structure based on -fifo queues, which
provides strong (but still relaxed with regard to a sequential specification)
guarantees. The parameter allows to dynamically configure the trade-off
between scalability and the required ordering guarantee. Third, and finally, we
combine both data structures into a hybrid, -priority data structure, which
provides scalability similar to the work-stealing based approach for larger
, while giving strong ordering guarantees for smaller . We argue for
using the hybrid data structure as the best compromise for generic,
priority-based task-scheduling.
We analyze the behavior and trade-offs of our data structures in the context
of a simple parallelization of Dijkstra's single-source shortest path
algorithm. Our theoretical analysis and simulations show that both the
centralized and the hybrid -priority based data structures can give strong
guarantees on the useful work performed by the parallel Dijkstra algorithm. We
support our results with experimental evidence on an 80-core Intel Xeon system
An elliptic expansion of the potential field source surface model
Context. The potential field source surface model is frequently used as a
basis for further scientific investigations where a comprehensive coronal
magnetic field is of importance. Its parameters, especially the position and
shape of the source surface, are crucial for the interpretation of the state of
the interplanetary medium. Improvements have been suggested that introduce one
or more additional free parameters to the model, for example, the current sheet
source surface (CSSS) model.
Aims. Relaxing the spherical constraint of the source surface and allowing it
to be elliptical gives modelers the option of deforming it to more accurately
match the physical environment of the specific period or location to be
analyzed.
Methods. A numerical solver is presented that solves Laplace's equation on a
three-dimensional grid using finite differences. The solver is capable of
working on structured spherical grids that can be deformed to create elliptical
source surfaces.
Results. The configurations of the coronal magnetic field are presented using
this new solver. Three-dimensional renderings are complemented by
Carrington-like synoptic maps of the magnetic configuration at different
heights in the solar corona. Differences in the magnetic configuration computed
by the spherical and elliptical models are illustrated.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
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