Optimal Local Algorithms via Topology-Sensitivity

Description du projet

Appréhender la localité pour améliorer les réseaux et l’équilibrage des charges

La rapide expansion de la numérisation, des technologies des données et des réseaux a engendré une croissance substantielle dans tous les secteurs, apportant de nombreux avantages. Néanmoins, ces progrès ont également induit l’émergence de réseaux massifs et une augmentation des coûts et des exigences liés aux infrastructures. Le projet OLA-TOPSENS, financé par le CER, va se pencher sur la localité: que peut-on calculer en utilisant uniquement des informations locales et quelle est la quantité d’informations nécessaire? La réponse à cette question est essentielle à l’optimisation de ces vastes réseaux et à l’amélioration de la répartition des charges et des tâches en leur sein. Qui plus est, les résultats pourraient connaître des applications plus larges dans divers domaines de l’algorithmique. Le projet s’appuiera sur des analyses et des recherches innovantes pour développer une compréhension fondamentale de la localité.

Objectif

Considering the rapid growth of data sets and network sizes over the past decade, there is little doubt that the future of computation is distributed. One central aspect lying at the heart of distributed algorithms is the question of locality: what can be computed using only local information, and how much information is needed? While answering this question is essential for obtaining highly efficient algorithms for many important distributed problemssuch as load balancing in massive networks, locality is a fundamentally important concept also in many other fields of algorithmics, such as classical sequential algorithms, massively parallel algorithms, dynamic algorithms, sublinear algorithms, streaming algorithms, or online algorithms.

In the context of distributed algorithms, a careful analysis of recent research on impossibilities reveals the key challenges in understanding localityand therefore in designing optimal algorithmsfor many graph problems: understanding 1) how to solve tree-like structures efficiently and 2) how to explicitly exploit any deviations from a tree-like topology algorithmically. The goal of this proposal is to gain a fundamental understanding of locality via the novel concept of topology-sensitive algorithms that precisely addresses these key challenges by explicitly exploiting local topological features in the input instance. Such an understanding will result in optimal algorithms and tight complexity bounds for many important distributed problems, thereby resolving central questions in distributed algorithms that have been open for decades, laying the foundations for highly efficient and scalable algorithms in massive networks, and implying significant improvements over the state-of-the-art in a variety of other algorithmic fields. In a nutshell, the proposed project aims at a world in which everything that can be done locally will be done locally.