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| Title |
Design and analysis of the simplest (and useful) randomized algorithm in the world
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| Speaker | Jun (Jim) Xu |
| Abstract | |
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The problem of how to efficiently maintain a large number (say
millions) of statistics counters that need to be incremented at very
high speed has received considerable research attention
recently. This problem arises in a variety of router management
algorithms and data streaming algorithms, where a large array of counters
is used to track various network statistics and to implement various counting
sketches respectively. While fitting these counters entirely
in SRAM meets the access speed requirement, a large amount of SRAM may
be needed with a typical counter size of 32 or 64 bits, and hence the
high cost. Solutions proposed in recent works have used hybrid
architectures where small counters in SRAM are incremented at high
speed, and occasionally written back (``flushed'') to larger
counters in DRAM. Previous solutions have used complex schedulers with
tree-like or heap data structures to pick which counters in SRAM are about to
overflow, and flush them to the corresponding DRAM counters.
In this work, we present a novel hybrid SRAM/DRAM counter architecture
that consumes much less SRAM and has a much simpler
design of the scheduler than previous approaches. Our design uses a
small write-back buffer (in SRAM) that stores indices of the overflowed
counters. The key innovation of our work is an extremely simple
randomized algorithm that guarantee that SRAM counters do not overflow in
bursts large enough to fill up the write-back buffer even in the worst case,
as proven through large deviation theory. This is joint work with Qi Zhao and Dr. Zhen Liu.
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Bio |
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Jun (Jim) Xu is an Associate Professor in the College
of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He
received his Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
from The Ohio State University in 2000. His current
research interests include data streaming algorithms
for the measurement and monitoring of computer
networks, algorithms and data structures for computer
networks, network security, and performance modeling
and simulation. He received the NSF CAREER award in
2003 for his ongoing efforts in establishing
fundamental lower bound and tradeoff results in
networking. He is a co-author of a paper that won the
Best Student Paper Award from 2004 ACM Sigmetrics/IFIP
Performance joint conference, and the faculty advisor
of the student winners. He received 2006 IBM faculty
award for making fundamental contributions to
performance evaluation methodologies.
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