clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) (02/14/86)
(GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street) (SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Rd.) COLLOQUIUM, Tues., Feb. 25, 11 am, SF 1105 Professor C.C. Gotlieb University of Toronto, DCS. "Supercomputer Review" SYSTEMS/THEORY/AI SEMINAR Thurs., Feb. 27, 11 am, GB 220 Dr. Yoram Moses M.I.T. "Knowledge, Common Knowledge, and Simultaneous Actions in the Presence of Faults" (Abstract given below.) NUMERICAL ANALYSIS SEMINAR, Thurs., Feb. 27, 3 pm, SF 1101 Professor T.E. Hull University of Toronto, DCS. "What can be expected of elementary functions?" (Abstract given below.) ABSTRACTS Yoram Moses: "Knowledge, Common Knowledge, and Simultaneous Actions in the Presence of Faults" We show that any protocol that guarantees to perform a particular action simultaneously at all sites of a distributed system must guarantee that the sites attain common knowledge of particular facts when such an action is performed. We analyze what facts become common knowledge at various points in the execution of protocols in a simple model of a system in which pro- cessors are liable to crash. We obtain a new protocol for Simultaneous Byzantine Agreement that is optimal in all of its runs. That is, rather than achieving the worst case behaviour, every run of the protocol halts at the earliest possible time, given the pattern in which failures occur. This may happen as early as after two rounds. We characterize precisely what failure patterns require the protocol to run for k rounds, 1<k<t+2, generalizing and simplifying the lower bound proof for Byzantine agreement. We also show a non-trivial simultaneous action for which popular belief would suggest that t+1 rounds would be required in the worst case, and use our analysis to design a protocol for it that always halts in two rounds. This work sheds considerable light on many heretofore mysterious aspects of the Byzantine Agreement problem. It is one of the first examples of how reasoning about knowledge can be used to obtain improved solutions to prob- lems in distributed computing. This is joint work with Cynthia Dwork of IBM Almaden. T.E. Hull: "What can be expected of elementary functions?" Scientific computing would be better off (e.g., in programming convenience, portability, and proving correctness) if we had better standards. The arithmetic is improving in this respect (e.g., IEEE), but more needs to be done in related areas such as elementary functions and exception handling. This talk is about what can be reasonably guaranteed about the elementary functions (sqrt, exp, ln, arctan, sin, cos, ...) - both in fixed precision and variable precision environments. Special attention will be given to the exponential function. -- Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 (416) 978-4058 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke