We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

While the use of MapReduce systems (such as Hadoop) for large scale data analysis has been widely recognized and studied, we have recently seen an explosion in the number of systems developed for cloud data serving. These newer systems address "cloud OLTP" applications, though they typically do not support ACID transactions. Examples of systems proposed for cloud serving use include BigTable, PNUTS, Cassandra, HBase, Azure, CouchDB, SimpleDB, Voldemort, and many others. Further, they are being applied to a diverse range of applications that differ considerably from traditional (e.g., TPC-C like) serving workloads. The number of emerging cloud serving systems and the wide range of proposed applications, coupled with a lack of apples-to-apples performance comparisons, makes it difficult to understand the tradeoffs between systems and the workloads for which they are suited. We present the "Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark" (YCSB) framework, with the goal of facilitating performance comparisons of the new generation of cloud data serving systems. We define a core set of benchmarks and report results for four widely used systems: Cassandra, HBase, Yahoo!'s PNUTS, and a simple sharded MySQL implementation. We also hope to foster the development of additional cloud benchmark suites that represent other classes of applications by making our benchmark tool available via open source. In this regard, a key feature of the YCSB framework/tool is that it is extensible--it supports easy definition of new workloads, in addition to making it easy to benchmark new systems.

/pdf/benchmarking-cloud-serving-systems-with-ycsb-3u47swhmki.pdf

Benchmarking cloud serving systems with YCSB

In this paper, we review the background and state-of-the-art of big data. We first introduce the general background of big data and review related technologies, such as could computing, Internet of Things, data centers, and Hadoop. We then focus on the four phases of the value chain of big data, i.e., data generation, data acquisition, data storage, and data analysis. For each phase, we introduce the general background, discuss the technical challenges, and review the latest advances. We finally examine the several representative applications of big data, including enterprise management, Internet of Things, online social networks, medial applications, collective intelligence, and smart grid. These discussions aim to provide a comprehensive overview and big-picture to readers of this exciting area. This survey is concluded with a discussion of open problems and future directions.

Big Data: A Survey

This paper presents control and coordination algorithms for groups of vehicles. The focus is on autonomous vehicle networks performing distributed sensing tasks where each vehicle plays the role of a mobile tunable sensor. The paper proposes gradient descent algorithms for a class of utility functions which encode optimal coverage and sensing policies. The resulting closed-loop behavior is adaptive, distributed, asynchronous, and verifiably correct.

Coverage control for mobile sensing networks

In this paper, we examine a number of SQL and socalled "NoSQL" data stores designed to scale simple OLTP-style application loads over many servers. Originally motivated by Web 2.0 applications, these systems are designed to scale to thousands or millions of users doing updates as well as reads, in contrast to traditional DBMSs and data warehouses. We contrast the new systems on their data model, consistency mechanisms, storage mechanisms, durability guarantees, availability, query support, and other dimensions. These systems typically sacrifice some of these dimensions, e.g. database-wide transaction consistency, in order to achieve others, e.g. higher availability and scalability.

/pdf/scalable-sql-and-nosql-data-stores-6133branpn.pdf

Scalable SQL and NoSQL data stores

In this paper we present two versions of a parallel finger structure FS on p processors that supports searches, insertions and deletions, and has a finger at each end. This is to our knowledge the first implementation of a parallel search structure that is work-optimal with respect to the finger bound and yet has very good parallelism (within a factor of O( (log p)^2 ) of optimal). We utilize an extended implicit batching framework that transparently facilitates the use of FS by any parallel program P that is modelled by a dynamically generated DAG D where each node is either a unit-time instruction or a call to FS. 
The total work done by either version of FS is bounded by the finger bound F[L] (for some linearization L of D ), i.e. each operation on an item with finger distance r takes O( log r + 1 ) amortized work; it is cheaper for items closer to a finger. Running P using the simpler version takes O( ( T[1] + F[L] ) / p + T[inf] + d * ( (log p)^2 + log n ) ) time on a greedy scheduler, where T[1],T[inf] are the size and span of D respectively, and n is the maximum number of items in FS, and d is the maximum number of calls to FS along any path in D. Using the faster version, this is reduced to O( ( T[1] + F[L] ) / p + T[inf] + d * (log p)^2 + s[L] ) time, where s[L] is the weighted span of D where each call to FS is weighted by its cost according to F[L]. We also sketch how to extend FS to support a fixed number of movable fingers. 
The data structures in our paper fit into the dynamic multithreading paradigm, and their performance bounds are directly composable with other data structures given in the same paradigm. Also, the results can be translated to practical implementations using work-stealing schedulers.

/pdf/parallel-finger-search-structures-njjfwii4dk.pdf

Parallel Finger Search Structures

Many exceptionally high-quality doctoral dissertations were submitted for the 2022 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award. After careful long deliberation, the award committee decided to share the award among two: ⋅ Dr. Naama Ben-David for her dissertation ''Theoretical Foundations for Practical Concurrent and Distributed Computation.'' ⋅ Dr. Manuela Fischer for her dissertation ''Local Algorithms for Classic Graph Problems.''

2022 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award

Consider the classical problem of information dissemination: one (or more) nodes in a network have some information that they want to distribute to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we study the cost of information dissemination in networks where edges have latencies, i.e., sending a message from one node to another takes some amount of time. We first generalize the idea of conductance to weighted graphs by defining $\phi _*$φ* to be the “critical weighted conductance” and $\ell _*$l* to be the “critical latency”. One goal of this paper is to argue that $\phi _*$φ* characterizes the connectivity of a weighted graph with latencies in much the same way that conductance characterizes the connectivity of unweighted graphs. We give near tight lower and upper bounds on the problem of information dissemination, up to polylogarithmic factors. Specifically, we show that in a graph with (weighted) diameter $D$D (with latencies as weights) and maximum degree $\Delta$Δ, any information dissemination algorithm requires at least $\Omega (\min (D+\Delta, \ell _*/\phi _*))$Ω(min(D+Δ,l*/φ*)) time in the worst case. We show several variants of the lower bound (e.g., for graphs with small diameter, graphs with small max-degree, etc.) by reduction to a simple combinatorial game. We then give nearly matching algorithms, showing that information dissemination can be solved in $O(\min ((D+\Delta)\log ^3{n}, (\ell _*/\phi _*)\log n)$O(min((D+Δ)log3n,(l*/φ*)logn) time. This is achieved by combining two cases. We show that the classical push-pull algorithm is (near) optimal when the diameter or the maximum degree is large. For the case where the diameter and the maximum degree are small, we give an alternative strategy in which we first discover the latencies and then use an algorithm for known latencies based on a weighted spanner construction. (Our algorithms are within polylogarithmic factors of being tight both for known and unknown latencies.) While it is easiest to express our bounds in terms of $\phi _*$φ* and $\ell _*$l*, in some cases they do not provide the most convenient definition of conductance in weighted graphs. Therefore we give a second (nearly) equivalent characterization, namely the average weighted conductance $\phi _{avg}$φavg.

Slow Links, Fast Links, and the Cost of Gossip

In this paper we look at the problem of scheduling tasks on a single-processor system, where each task requires unit time and must be scheduled within a certain time window, and each task can be added to or removed from the system at any time. On each operation, the system is allowed to reschedule any tasks, but the goal is to minimize the number of rescheduled tasks. Our main result is an allocator that maintains a valid schedule for all tasks in the system if their time windows have constant size and reschedules O(1/{\epsilon}*log(1/{\epsilon})) tasks on each insertion as {\epsilon}->0, where {\epsilon} is a certain measure of the schedule flexibility of the system. We also show that it is optimal for any allocator that works on arbitrary instances. We also briefly mention a few variants of the problem, such as if the tasks have time windows of difference sizes, for which we have an allocator that we conjecture reschedules only 1 task on each insertion if the schedule flexibility remains above a certain threshold.

/pdf/dynamic-reallocation-problems-in-scheduling-5630c1m9gb.pdf

Dynamic Reallocation Problems in Scheduling

This paper shows how to achieve contention resolution on a shared communication channel using only a small number of channel accesses -- both for listening and sending -- and the resulting algorithm is resistant to adversarial noise. The shared channel operates over a sequence of synchronized time slots, and in any slot agents may attempt to broadcast a packet. An agent's broadcast succeeds if no other agent broadcasts during that slot. If two or more agents broadcast in the same slot, then the broadcasts collide and both broadcasts fail. An agent listening on the channel during a slot receives ternary feedback, learning whether that slot had silence, a successful broadcast, or a collision. Agents are (adversarially) injected into the system over time. The goal is to coordinate the agents so that each is able to successfully broadcast its packet. A contention-resolution protocol is measured both in terms of its throughput and the number of slots during which an agent broadcasts or listens. Most prior work assumes that listening is free and only tries to minimize the number of broadcasts. This paper answers two foundational questions. First, is constant throughput achievable when using polylogarithmic channel accesses per agent, both for listening and broadcasting? Second, is constant throughput still achievable when an adversary jams some slots by broadcasting noise in them? Specifically, for $N$ packets arriving over time and $J$ jammed slots, we give an algorithm that with high probability in $N+J$ guarantees $\Theta(1)$ throughput and achieves on average $O(\texttt{polylog}(N+J))$ channel accesses against an adaptive adversary. We also have per-agent high-probability guarantees on the number of channel accesses -- either $O(\texttt{polylog}(N+J))$ or $O((J+1) \texttt{polylog}(N))$, depending on how quickly the adversary can react to what is being broadcast.

Seth Gilbert

Papers

Parallel Finger Search Structures

2022 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award

Slow Links, Fast Links, and the Cost of Gossip

Dynamic Reallocation Problems in Scheduling

Robust and Listening-Efficient Contention Resolution