Georgia Tech: Networking & Telecommunications Group


 
Title Design and analysis of the simplest (and useful) randomized algorithm in the world
Speaker Jun (Jim) Xu
Abstract
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.

Bio

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.