Parallel Exhaustive Search without Coordination

TL;DR

This paper investigates non-coordinating parallel algorithms for exhaustive search, achieving near-optimal speed-ups with high robustness and minimal communication, especially useful in fault-prone or resource-constrained environments.

Contribution

It introduces simple non-coordinating algorithms that attain near-optimal speed-ups for multiple searchers, with proven tight bounds on their performance.

Findings

Achieves a speed-up of 9/8 for two searchers

Achieves a speed-up of 4/3 for three searchers

Asymptotically, the speed-up is only four times worse than full coordination

Abstract

We analyze parallel algorithms in the context of exhaustive search over totally ordered sets. Imagine an infinite list of "boxes", with a "treasure" hidden in one of them, where the boxes' order reflects the importance of finding the treasure in a given box. At each time step, a search protocol executed by a searcher has the ability to peek into one box, and see whether the treasure is present or not. By equally dividing the workload between them, $k$ searchers can find the treasure $k$ times faster than one searcher. However, this straightforward strategy is very sensitive to failures (e.g., crashes of processors), and overcoming this issue seems to require a large amount of communication. We therefore address the question of designing parallel search algorithms maximizing their speed-up and maintaining high levels of robustness, while minimizing the amount of resources for coordination. Based on the observation that algorithms that avoid communication are inherently robust, we analyze the best running time performance of non-coordinating algorithms. Specifically, we devise non-coordinating algorithms that achieve a speed-up of $9/8$ for two searchers, a speed-up of $4/3$ for three searchers, and in general, a speed-up of $\frac{k}{4}(1+1/k)^2$ for any $k\geq 1$ searchers. Thus, asymptotically, the speed-up is only four times worse compared to the case of full-coordination, and our algorithms are surprisingly simple and hence applicable. Moreover, these bounds are tight in a strong sense as no non-coordinating search algorithm can achieve better speed-ups. Overall, we highlight that, in faulty contexts in which coordination between the searchers is technically difficult to implement, intrusive with respect to privacy, and/or costly in term of resources, it might well be worth giving up on coordination, and simply run our non-coordinating exhaustive search algorithms.