Sixue Liu will present his General Exam "Faster and Simpler Concurrent Algorithms for Graph Problems" on May 13, 2019 at 2pm in CS 105.

The members of his committee are Robert Tarjan (adviser), Bernard Chazelle, Matt Weinberg.

Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.  His abstract and reading list follow below.

Abstract:

Many classical graph problems have efficient sequential algorithms, with some of them even running in linear time in the input size, which is best possible. But linear time is not fast enough for massive datasets, for which we turn to concurrency.

We study concurrent algorithms for two classic problems: the connected components of an undirected graph, and the strongly connected components of a directed graph. The first problem has been extensively studied in the concurrent setting, especially on the classical Parallel Random Access Machines (PRAM). However, many fast PRAM algorithms are hard to implement due to the complications in the algorithms.

Our first result is several new elegant PRAM algorithms for the connected components problem, which achieve the same time complexity comparing to the existing best ones but are significantly simpler. Our algorithms are deterministic, use linear number of processors, and run in $O(\log n)$ time. This is joint work with Robert Tarjan.

Our second result is a simple PRAM algorithm for connected components and spanning forest that runs faster than any existing ones when the input graph has small diameter, which is usually the case in real-world applications. The algorithm is randomized, uses linear number of processors, and runs in $O(\log d \log\log n)$ time with high probability where $d$ is the diameter of the input graph. This is joint work with Robert Tarjan and Peilin Zhong.

We also examine the strongly connected components problem, for which a truly sublinear time and nearly linear work concurrent algorithm is only known recently. We show that the current time bound $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3})$ for this algorithm is tight by constructing a hard example. It is possible to design new algorithms to improve this upper bound. This is joint work with Sepehr Assadi and Robert Tarjan.

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