No Arabic abstract
The emergence of systems with non-volatile main memory (NVM) increases the interest in the design of emph{recoverable concurrent objects} that are robust to crash-failures, since their operations are able to recover from such failures by using state retained in NVM. Of particular interest are recoverable algorithms that, in addition to ensuring object consistency, also provide emph{detectability}, a correctness condition requiring that the recovery code can infer if the failed operation was linearized or not and, in the former case, obtain its response. In this work, we investigate the space complexity of detectable algorithms and the external support they require. We make the following three contributions. First, we present the first wait-free bounded-space detectable read/write and CAS object implementations. Second, we prove that the bit complexity of every $N$-process obstruction-free detectable CAS implementation, assuming values from a domain of size at least $N$, is $Omega(N)$. Finally, we prove that the following holds for obstruction-free detectable implementations of a large class of objects: their recoverable operations must be provided with emph{auxiliary state} -- state that is not required by the non-recoverable counterpart implementation -- whose value must be provided from outside the operation, either by the system or by the caller of the operation. In contrast, this external support is, in general, not required if the recoverable algorithm is not detectable.
Relaxing the sequential specification of shared objects has been proposed as a promising approach to obtain implementations with better complexity. In this paper, we study the step complexity of relaxed variants of two common shared objects: max registers and counters. In particular, we consider the $k$-multiplicative-accurate max register and the $k$-multiplicative-accurate counter, where read operations are allowed to err by a multiplicative factor of $k$ (for some $k in mathbb{N}$). More accurately, reads are allowed to return an approximate value $x$ of the maximum value $v$ previously written to the max register, or of the number $v$ of increments previously applied to the counter, respectively, such that $v/k leq x leq v cdot k$. We provide upper and lower bounds on the complexity of implementing these objects in a wait-free manner in the shared memory model.
An assignment of colours to the vertices of a graph is stable if any two vertices of the same colour have identically coloured neighbourhoods. The goal of colour refinement is to find a stable colouring that uses a minimum number of colours. This is a widely used subroutine for graph isomorphism testing algorithms, since any automorphism needs to be colour preserving. We give an $O((m+n)log n)$ algorithm for finding a canonical version of such a stable colouring, on graphs with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. We show that no faster algorithm is possible, under some modest assumptions about the type of algorithm, which captures all known colour refinement algorithms.
We present a tight RMR complexity lower bound for the recoverable mutual exclusion (RME) problem, defined by Golab and Ramaraju cite{GR2019a}. In particular, we show that any $n$-process RME algorithm using only atomic read, write, fetch-and-store, fetch-and-increment, and compare-and-swap operations, has an RMR complexity of $Omega(log n/loglog n)$ on the CC and DSM model. This lower bound covers all realistic synchronization primitives that have been used in RME algorithms and matches the best upper bounds of algorithms employing swap objects (e.g., [5,6,10]). Algorithms with better RMR complexity than that have only been obtained by either (i) assuming that all failures are system-wide [7], (ii) employing fetch-and-add objects of size $(log n)^{omega(1)}$ [12], or (iii) using artificially defined synchronization primitives that are not available in actual systems [6,9].
We derive upper and lower bounds on the fidelity susceptibility in terms of macroscopic thermodynamical quantities, like susceptibilities and thermal average values. The quality of the bounds is checked by the exact expressions for a single spin in an external magnetic field. Their usefulness is illustrated by two examples of many-particle models which are exactly solved in the thermodynamic limit: the Dicke superradiance model and the single impurity Kondo model. It is shown that as far as divergent behavior is considered, the fidelity susceptibility and the thermodynamic susceptibility are equivalent for a large class of models exhibiting critical behavior.
Shors and Grovers famous quantum algorithms for factoring and searching show that quantum computers can solve certain computational problems significantly faster than any classical computer. We discuss here what quantum computers_cannot_ do, and specifically how to prove limits on their computational power. We cover the main known techniques for proving lower bounds, and exemplify and compare the methods.