After a long exhausting period with many interruptions my diploma thesis in mathematics "On the Structure of the Graph of Unique Symmetric Base Exchanges of Bispanning Graphs" is finalized and submitted. The full abstract of the thesis is shown below, and an additional German abstract is available further down the page.

The final version of the thesis is available here: thesis pdf , and was also uploaded to arXiv.org as 1601.03526.

The underlying problem discussed in the thesis is best explained using a game on a bispanning graph. You can play the game with this Java Applet or using the Java WebStart Launcher (if the Applet does not work). You play Alice's role and want to flip the colors of all edges in the graph. Bob will try to prevent this from happening.

In addition to the thesis itself, the source code of the accompanying computer program is also available. It was used while preparing the thesis to calculate exchanges graphs and to test many hypothesis about bispanning graphs. The program can enumerate all bispanning graphs and their exchange graphs for small numbers of vertices. See the program page for downloadable lists and PDFs of all bispanning graphs for small numbers of vertices.

Abstract

Today, we gave an overview presentation of the vision behind Project Thrill, its current state, and how it will be used to implement suffix and LCP array construction, and many other distributed algorithms: 2015-10-01 Massive Suffix Array Construction with Thrill.pdf .

Our paper "Engineering Parallel String Sorting" was accepted for publication in Springer's Algorithmica Journal, and is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00453-015-0071-1.

Compare to our older technical report, the journal edition contains many (minor and major) corrections, additional references and better explanations.

A pre-print version is available here: Engineering-Parallel-String-Sorting.pdf .

Please refer to the main parallel-string-sorting page for details and source code.

At our institute I gave an ambitious presentation today which showcased much of my daily work flow in emacs. People have titled it the "emacs lightshow" due to the speed of flashing and changing lights on my screens. Of course, the idea is to show people what emacs can do and at the same time get them to try it. Emacs is different from other editors in that it is a life operating system that is infinitely complex, is constantly extended, and adapts to what you need.

For this presentation I made an emacs tutorial. There are many emacs tutorials online, and they are probably better than this one. However, I focused on listing something like the top 100 key command sequences that you need in real day-to-day editing life, instead of the most flashy features. This makes this tutorial something that you can print out, and go through step-by-step once to try everything out; and then start over and learn the most important keys from the top.

The emacs tutorial is available as a PDF: emacs Tutorial - Beating the Learning Curve - From Zero to Lightspeed.pdf

or available as the org-mode source file: emacs Tutorial - Beating the Learning Curve - From Zero to Lightspeed.org

and in my github .emacs.d repo: https://github.com/bingmann/dot-emacs.git

We are very glad to have been given the opportunity to present our work on bulk-parallel priority queues for external memory at the 14th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2015) in Paris. Our paper is in the proceedings and also available here: paper-SEA15-Bulk-Parallel-Priority-Queue.pdf

The talk was given by Thomas Keh, and the slides of the presentation are available online: 2015-06-29 A Bulk-Parallel Priority Queue in External Memory with STXXL.pdf . The implementation is available in the current master branch of STXXL at github.

Today, our technical report on "A Bulk-Parallel Priority Queue in External Memory with STXXL" is now available on arXiv as 1504.00545 or locally: 1504.00545v1.pdf with source 1504.00545v1.tar.gz (130 KiB). A big thanks goes to Thomas Keh for the hard work he did in his bachelor thesis, and to Peter Sanders for all the insights into priority queues. The technical report is an extended version of our paper that will appear at the 14th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms - SEA 2015.

The bulk-parallel priority queue is current available in the development repository of STXXL on Github.

On 2015-06-29, Thomas Keh presented the PPQ at SEA'15 in Paris.

Today, I presented our work in progress on a distributed computation platform for Big Data algorithms at the LSDMA All-Hands-Meeting in Berlin. One of the currently proposed names is DALKIT. The talk covers the current state our student project is in, which consists mainly of the design of the framework's interface, architecture and future components.

The slides of the presentation 2015-03-27 Project DALKIT.pdf are available online. However, as usual, my slides are very difficult to understand without the audio track. For future "final" version presentations there will probably be more videos.

STXXL is an implementation of the C++ standard template library STL for external memory (out-of-core) computations, i.e., STXXL implements containers and algorithms that can process huge volumes of data that only fit on disks. While the compatibility to the STL supports ease of use and compatibility with existing applications, another design priority is high performance.

More history about STXXL can be found in the blog post to 1.4.0. Today, the second release of the new 1.4 branch was published:

What's new in 1.4.1 ?

• Integrated support for kernel based asynchronous I/O on Linux (new file type "linuxaio"), which exploits Native Command Queuing (NCQ) if available.
• Merged stxxl::unordered_map branch, which provides a hash map backed by external memory.
• Replaced struct default_completion_handler with a NULL pointer, thus avoiding superfluous new/delete work for each I/O request.
• Added stxxl::external_shared_ptr which is a proxy class to allow use of shared_ptr classes inside stxxl containers.
• Fixing bugs and warnings on 32-bit systems (yes, they still exist).
• Use atomic_counted_object in class file for request reference counting.
• Adding support for MinGW-w64 (64-bit) systems with working SJLJ thread implementations.

See the CHANGELOG for further minor changes.

Some time last week my YouTube video "15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes" reached 1 million views. The original video was uploaded on 2013-05-20 which is just 524 days ago, so on average about every 45.2 seconds someone started to watch the video (which itself is about 6 minutes long). The world is a really big place. Most of the views, however, occured in spikes of interest, as seen in the graph below.

The original video contained only 15 algorithms. The program "Sound of Sorting" itself, which was used to create the animations, now contains 30 algorithms or variants. For some of the additional algorithms I also created videos on YouTube, which are also worthwhile watching.

There are two parallel algorithms based on sorting networks, where each left-to-right sweep is one parallel sorting step:

• Batcher's Odd-Event Mergesort and Batcher's Bitonic Sort

An algorithm, which is optimal in terms of the number of writes to sort the array:

• Cycle Sort

An adaptive sorting algorithm which detects presorted areas, and is used in many modern programming language runtime libraries:

• Tim Sort

An in-place stable mergesort with O(1) extra space:

• Block Merge Sort (WikiSort)

And two algorithms, that have a high asymptotic worst-case complexity, and are thus more a joke, but still pretty to watch:

• Slow Sort and Stooge Sort

Last Friday we were able to finish a technical report on "Practical Massively Parallel Sorting -- Basic Algorithmic Ideas", which is now available on arXiv as 1410.6754 or locally: 1410.6754v1.pdf with source 1410.6754v1.tar.gz (130 KiB). A big thanks goes to all the other authors, Michael Axtmann, Peter Sanders, and Christian Schulz.

The report proposes two new hierarchical algorithms "Recurse Last Mergesort" (RLM-Sort) and "Adaptive Multipass Sample Sort" (AMS-Sort), together with randomized data exchange schemes to avoid worst case behavior on large instances.

We now plan to implement some of the new algorithms.