ISAAC 2009 Accepted Papers

The list of accepted papers for ISAAC 2009 in Hawaii has now been posted.
I’m happy to see that my paper “Counting in the Presence of Memory Faults” is on the list (number 136), it has been co-authored by Gerth Brodal, Allan Jørgensen and Gabriel Moruz. The paper presents counting algorithms designed in the Faulty Memory RAM proposed by Finocchi and Italiano.
A fault-tolerant resilient counting algorithm as defined in our paper is a datastructure with an increment operation and a query operation. The query algorithm returns the number of increments operations that has been performed on the data structure, within an additive error factor.

It is simple to design such a datastructure in the standard RAM using a simple integer variable, but this is not possible in faulty memory RAM where arbritrary memory cells can get corrupted at any point in time. In the paper we present tradeoff lower bounds and upper bounds and tradeoffs between the additive error factor and the time used per operation.