Showing papers by "Richard Cole published in 2010"

Resource oblivious sorting on multicores

Abstract: We present a new deterministic sorting algorithm that interleaves the partitioning of a sample sort with merging. Sequentially, it sorts n elements in O(n log n) time cache-obliviously with an optimal number of cache misses. The parallel complexity (or critical path length) of the algorithm is O(log n log log n), which improves on previous bounds for deterministic sample sort. Given a multicore computing environment with a global shared memory and p cores, each having a cache of size M organized in blocks of size B, our algorithm can be scheduled effectively on these p cores in a cache-oblivious manner. We improve on the above cache-oblivious processor-aware parallel implementation by using the Priority Work Stealing Scheduler (PWS) that we presented recently in a companion paper [12]. The PWS scheduler is both processor- and cache-oblivious (i.e., resource oblivious), and it tolerates asynchrony among the cores. Using PWS, we obtain a resource oblivious scheduling of our sorting algorithm that matches the performance of the processor-aware version. Our analysis includes the delay incurred by false-sharing. We also establish good bounds for our algorithm with the randomized work stealing scheduler.

Discrete Price Updates Yield Fast Convergence in Ongoing Markets with Finite Warehouses

Abstract: This paper shows that in suitable markets, even with out-of-equilibrium trade allowed, a simple price update rule leads to rapid convergence toward the equilibrium. In particular, this paper considers a Fisher market repeated over an unbounded number of time steps, with the addition of finite sized warehouses to enable non-equilibrium trade. The main result is that suitable tatonnement style price updates lead to convergence in a significant subset of markets satisfying the Weak Gross Substitutes property. Throughout this process the warehouse are always able to store or meet demand imbalances (the needed capacity depends on the initial imbalances). Finally, our price update rule is robust in a variety of regards: 1. The updates for each good depend only on information about that good (its current price, its excess demand since its last update) and occur asynchronously from updates to other prices. 2. The process is resilient to error in the excess demand data. 3. Likewise, the process is resilient to discreteness, i.e. a limit to divisibility, both of goods and money.

Inner Product Spaces for MinSum Coordination Mechanisms

Abstract: We study policies aiming to minimize the weighted sum of completion times of jobs in the context of coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling problems. Our goal is to design local policies that achieve a good price of anarchy in the resulting equilibria for unrelated machine scheduling. To obtain the approximation bounds, we introduce a new technique that while conceptually simple, seems to be quite powerful. With this method we are able to prove the following results. First, we consider Smith's Rule, which orders the jobs on a machine in ascending processing time to weight ratio, and show that it achieves an approximation ratio of 4. We also demonstrate that this is the best possible for deterministic non-preemptive strongly local policies. Since Smith's Rule is always optimal for a given assignment, this may seem unsurprising, but we then show that better approximation ratios can be obtained if either preemption or randomization is allowed. We prove that ProportionalSharing, a preemptive strongly local policy, achieves an approximation ratio of 2.618 for the weighted sum of completion times, and an approximation ratio of 2.5 in the unweighted case. Again, we observe that these bounds are tight. Next, we consider Rand, a natural non-preemptive but randomized policy. We show that it achieves an approximation ratio of at most 2.13; moreover, if the sum of the weighted completion times is negligible compared to the cost of the optimal solution, this improves to \pi /2. Finally, we show that both ProportionalSharing and Rand induce potential games, and thus always have a pure Nash equilibrium (unlike Smith's Rule). This also allows us to design the first \emph{combinatorial} constant-factor approximation algorithm minimizing weighted completion time for unrelated machine scheduling that achieves a factor of 2+ \epsilon for any \epsilon > 0.

Coordination Mechanisms for Weighted Sum of Completion Times in Machine Scheduling

Abstract: We study policies aiming to minimize the weighted sum of completion times of jobs in the context of coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling problems. Our goal is to design local policies that achieve a good price of anarchy in the resulting equilibria for unrelated machine scheduling. In short, we present the first constant-factor-approximate coordination mechanisms for this model and show that our bounds imply a new combinatorial constant-factor approximation algorithm for the underlying optimization problem. More specifically: We present a generalization of the ShortestFirst policy for weighted jobs, called SmithRule policy; we prove that it achieves an approximation ratio of 4 and show that any set of strongly local ordering policies can result in equilibria with approximation ratio at least 4 even for unweighted jobs. The main result of our paper is ProportionalSharing, a preemptive strongly local policy that generalizes the EqualSharing policy for weighted jobs and beats this lower bound of 4; we show that this policy achieves an approximation ratio of 2.619 for the weighted sum of completion times and an approximation ratio of 2.5 for the (unweighted) sum of completion times. Again, we observe that these bounds are tight. Furthermore, we show that the ProportionalSharing policy induces potential games (in which best-response dynamics converge to pure Nash equilibria). All of our upper bounds are for the robust price of anarchy, defined by Roughgarden [39], so they naturally extend to mixed Nash equilibria, correlated equilibria, and regret minimization dynamics. Finally, we prove that the games induced by ProportionalSharing are beta?-nice, which yields the first combinatorial constant-factor approximation algorithm minimizing weighted completion time for unrelated machine scheduling.