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Influence maximization (IM) is the problem of finding a seed vertex set which is expected to incur the maximum influence spread on a graph. It has various applications in practice such as devising an effective and efficient approach to disseminate information, news or ad within a social network. The problem is shown to be NP-hard and approximation algorithms with provable quality guarantees exist in the literature. However, these algorithms are computationally expensive even for medium-scaled graphs. Furthermore, graph algorithms usually suffer from spatial and temporal irregularities during memory accesses, and this adds an extra cost on top of the already expensive IM kernels. In this article we leverage fused sampling, memoization, and vectorization to restructure, parallelize and boost their performance on undirected networks. The proposed approach employs a pseudo-random function and performs multiple Monte-Carlo simulations in parallel to exploit the SIMD lanes effectively and efficiently. In addition, it significantly reduces the number of edge traversals, hence the amount of data brought from the memory, which is critical for almost all memory-bound graph kernels. We apply the proposed approach to the traditional MixGreedy algorithm and propose INFuseR-MG which is more than $3000\times$ 3000 × faster than the greedy approaches and can run on large graphs that have been considered as too large in the literature. For instance, the new algorithm runs in 2.09, 0.08, 0.36 seconds on graphs Amazon, NetHEP, NetPhy with 16 threads where the sequential baseline takes 141.3, 259.1 and 1725.2 seconds, respectively. To compare INFuseR-MG with the state-of-the-art approximation algorithms, we conduct a thorough experimental analysis with various influence settings. The results on real-life, undirected networks show that on 16 threads, INFuseR-MG is $2.3\times$ 2. 3 × – $173.8\times$ 173. 8 × faster than state-of-the-art while being superior in terms of influence scores, and using a comparable amount of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose Hessian Approximated Multiple Subsets Iteration (HAMSI), which is a generic second order incremental algorithm for solving large-scale partially separable convex and nonconvex optimization problems. The algorithm is based on a local quadratic approximation, and hence, allows incorporating curvature information to speed-up the convergence. HAMSI is inherently parallel and it scales nicely with the number of processors. We prove the convergence properties of our algorithm when the subset selection step is deterministic. Combined with techniques for effectively utilizing modern parallel computer architectures, we illustrate that a particular implementation of the proposed method based on L-BFGS updates converges more rapidly than a parallel gradient descent when both methods are used to solve large-scale matrix factorization problems. This performance gain comes only at the expense of using memory that scales linearly with the total size of the optimization variables. We conclude that HAMSI may be considered as a viable alternative in many large scale problems, where first order methods based on variants of gradient descent are applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose two heuristics for the bipartite matching problem that are amenable to shared-memory parallelization. The first heuristic is very intriguing from a parallelization perspective. It has no significant algorithmic synchronization overhead and no conflict resolution is needed across threads. We show that this heuristic has an approximation ratio of around 0.632 under some common conditions. The second heuristic is designed to obtain a larger matching by employing the well-known Karp–Sipser heuristic on a judiciously chosen subgraph of the original graph. We show that the Karp–Sipser heuristic always finds a maximum cardinality matching in the chosen subgraph. Although the Karp–Sipser heuristic is hard to parallelize for general graphs, we exploit the structure of the selected subgraphs to propose a specialized implementation which demonstrates very good scalability. We prove that this second heuristic has an approximation guarantee of around 0.866 under the same conditions as in the first algorithm. We discuss parallel implementations of the proposed heuristics on a multicore architecture. Experimental results, for demonstrating speed-ups and verifying the theoretical results in practice, are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature search is one of the most important steps of academic research. With more than 100,000 papers published each year just in computer science, performing a complete literature search becomes a Herculean task. Some of the existing approaches and tools for literature search cannot compete with the characteristics of today’s literature, and they suffer from ambiguity and homonymy. Techniques based on citation information are more robust to the mentioned issues. Thus, we recently built a Web service called the advisor, which provides personalized recommendations to researchers based on their papers of interest. Since most recommendation methods may return redundant results, diversifying the results of the search process is necessary to increase the amount of information that one can reach via an automated search. This article targets the problem of result diversification in citation-based bibliographic search, assuming that the citation graph itself is the only information available and no categories or intents are known. The contribution of this work is threefold. We survey various random walk--based diversification methods and enhance them with the direction awareness property to allow users to reach either old, foundational (possibly well-cited and well-known) research papers or recent (most likely less-known) ones. Next, we propose a set of novel algorithms based on vertex selection and query refinement. A set of experiments with various evaluation criteria shows that the proposed γ-RLM algorithm performs better than the existing approaches and is suitable for real-time bibliographic search in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elimination tree model for sparse unsymmetric matrices and an algorithm for constructing it have been recently proposed by Eisenstat and Liu [SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 26 (2005), pp. 686-705] and [SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 29 (2008), pp. 1363-1381]. The construction algorithm has a worst-case time complexity of Θ(mn) for an n X n unsymmetric matrix having m off-diagonal nonzeros. We propose another algorithm that has a worst-case time complexity of ...(mlogn). We compare the two algorithms experimentally and show that both algorithms are efficient in general. The algorithm of Eisenstat and Liu is faster in many practical cases, yet there are instances in which there is a significant difference between the running time of the two algorithms in favor of the one proposed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the following task assignment problem. Communicating tasks are to be assigned to heterogeneous processors interconnected with a heterogeneous network. The objective is to minimize the total sum of the execution and communication costs. The problem is NP-hard. We present an exact algorithm based on the well-known A* search. We report simulation results over a wide range of parameters where the largest solved instance contains about three hundred tasks to be assigned to eight processors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The problem of task assignment in heterogeneous computing systems has been studied for many years with many variations. We consider the version in which communicating tasks are to be assigned to heterogeneous processors with identical communication links to minimize the sum of the total execution and communication costs. Our contributions are three fold: a task clustering method which takes the execution times of the tasks into account; two metrics to determine the order in which tasks are assigned to the processors; a refinement heuristic which improves a given assignment. We use these three methods to obtain a family of task assignment algorithms including multilevel ones that apply clustering and refinement heuristics repeatedly. We have implemented eight existing algorithms to test the proposed methods. Our refinement algorithm improves the solutions of the existing algorithms by up to 15% and the proposed algorithms obtain better solutions than these refined solutions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]