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FAILURE-SENSITIVE ANALYSIS OF PARALLEL ALGORITHMS WITH CONTROLLED MEMORY ACCESS CONCURRENCY

    The abstract problem of using P failure-prone processors to cooperatively update all locations of an N-element shared array is called Write-All. Solutions to Write-All can be used iteratively to construct efficient simulations of PRAM algorithms on failure-prone PRAMS. Such use of Write-All in simulations is abstracted in terms of the iterative Write-All problem. The efficiency of the algorithmic solutions for Write-All and iterative Write-All is measured in terms of work complexity where all processing steps taken by the processors are counted. This paper considers determinitic solutions for the Write-All and iterative Write-All problems in the fail-stop synchronous CRCW PRAM model where memory access concurrency needs to be controlled. A deterministic algorithm of Kanellakis, Michailidis, and Shvartsman [16] efficiently solves the Write-All problem in this model, while controlling read and write memory access concurrency. However it was not shown how the number of processor failures f affects the work efficiency of the algorithm. The results herein give a new analysis of the algorithm [16] that obtain failure-sensitive work bounds, while retaining the known memory access concurrency bounds. Specifically, the new result expresses the work bound as a function of N, Pandf. Another contribution in this paper is the new failure-sensitive analysis for iterative Write-All with controlled memory access concurrency. This result yields tighter bounds on work (vs. [16]) for simulations of PRAM algorithms on fail-stop PRAMS.

    This research is supported by the NSF Grants 9988304 and 0311368, and NSF ITR Grant 0121277. The work of the second author is supported in part by the NSF CAREER Award 0093065. The work of the third author is supported in part by the NSF CAREER Award 9984774. The work of the first author was performed in part, while at the University of Connecticut.

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