@article{17694,
  abstract     = {Constraining the properties of Population III (Pop III) stars will be very challenging because they reside in small galaxies at high redshift which will be difficult to directly detect. In this paper, we suggest that intensity mapping may be a promising method to study Pop III stars. Intensity mapping is a technique proposed to measure large-scale fluctuations of galaxy line emission in three dimensions without resolving individual sources. This technique is well suited for observing many faint galaxies because it can measure their cumulative emission even if they cannot be directly detected. We focus on intensity mapping of He ii recombination lines. These lines are much stronger in Pop III stars than Pop II stars because the harder spectra of Pop III stars are expected to produce many He ii ionizing photons. Measuring the He ii 1640 Å intensity mapping signal, along with the signals from other lines such as Lyα, Hα, and metal lines, could give constraints on the initial mass function (IMF) and star formation rate density of Pop III stars as a function of redshift. To demonstrate the feasibility of these observations, we estimate the strength of the Pop III He ii 1640 Å intensity mapping signal from z = 10–20. We show that at z ≈ 10, the signal could be measured accurately by two different hypothetical future instruments, one which cross-correlates He ii 1640 Å with CO(1–0) line emission from galaxies and the other with 21 cm emission from the intergalactic medium.},
  author       = {Visbal, Eli and Haiman, Zoltán and Bryan, Greg L.},
  issn         = {0035-8711},
  journal      = {Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
  number       = {3},
  pages        = {2506--2513},
  publisher    = {Oxford University Press},
  title        = {{Looking for Population III stars with He ii line intensity mapping}},
  doi          = {10.1093/mnras/stv785},
  volume       = {450},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{17702,
  abstract     = {Weak gravitational lensing is a powerful cosmological probe, with non--Gaussian features potentially containing the majority of the information. We examine constraints on the parameter triplet (Ωm,w,σ8) from non-Gaussian features of the weak lensing convergence field, including a set of moments (up to 4th order) and Minkowski functionals, using publicly available data from the 154deg2 CFHTLenS survey. We utilize a suite of ray--tracing N-body simulations spanning 91 points in (Ωm,w,σ8) parameter space, replicating the galaxy sky positions, redshifts and shape noise in the CFHTLenS catalogs. We then build an emulator that interpolates the simulated descriptors as a function of (Ωm,w,σ8), and use it to compute the likelihood function and parameter constraints. We employ a principal component analysis to reduce dimensionality and to help stabilize the constraints with respect to the number of bins used to construct each statistic. Using the full set of statistics, we find Σ8≡σ8(Ωm/0.27)^0.55=0.75±0.04 (68% C.L.), in agreement with previous values. We find that constraints on the (Ωm,σ8) doublet from the Minkowski functionals suffer a strong bias. However, high-order moments break the (Ωm,σ8) degeneracy and provide a tight constraint on these parameters with no apparent bias. The main contribution comes from quartic moments of derivatives.},
  author       = {Petri, Andrea and Liu, Jia and Haiman, Zoltán and May, Morgan and Hui, Lam and Kratochvil, Jan M.},
  issn         = {1550-7998},
  journal      = {Physical Review D},
  number       = {10},
  publisher    = {American Physical Society},
  title        = {{Emulating the CFHTLenS weak lensing data: Cosmological constraints from moments and Minkowski functionals}},
  doi          = {10.1103/physrevd.91.103511},
  volume       = {91},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{17710,
  abstract     = {Lensing peaks have been proposed as a useful statistic, containing cosmological information from non-Gaussianities that is inaccessible from traditional two-point statistics such as the power spectrum or two-point correlation functions. Here we examine constraints on cosmological parameters from weak lensing peak counts, using the publicly available data from the 154 deg^2 CFHTLenS survey. We utilize a new suite of ray-tracing N-body simulations on a grid of 91 cosmological models, covering broad ranges of the three parameters Ωm, σ8, and w, and replicating the Galaxy sky positions, redshifts, and shape noise in the CFHTLenS observations. We then build an emulator that interpolates the power spectrum and the peak counts to an accuracy of ≤5%, and compute the likelihood in the three-dimensional parameter space (Ωm, σ8, w) from both observables. We find that constraints from peak counts are comparable to those from the power spectrum, and somewhat tighter when different smoothing scales are combined. Neither observable can constrain w without external data. When the power spectrum and peak counts are combined, the area of the error "banana'' in the (Ωm, σ8) plane reduces by a factor of ≈2, compared to using the power spectrum alone. For a flat Λ cold dark matter model, combining both statistics, we obtain the constraint σ8(Ωm/0.27)^0.63=0.85+0.03−0.03.},
  author       = {Liu, Jia and Petri, Andrea and Haiman, Zoltán and Hui, Lam and Kratochvil, Jan M. and May, Morgan},
  issn         = {1550-7998},
  journal      = {Physical Review D},
  number       = {6},
  publisher    = {American Physical Society},
  title        = {{Cosmology constraints from the weak lensing peak counts and the power spectrum in CFHTLenS data}},
  doi          = {10.1103/physrevd.91.063507},
  volume       = {91},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7739,
  abstract     = {Currently, there is much debate on the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in wild populations. Is trait variation influenced by many genes of small effect or by a few genes of major effect? Where is additive genetic variation located in the genome? Do the same loci cause similar phenotypic variation in different populations? Great tits (Parus major) have been studied extensively in long‐term studies across Europe and consequently are considered an ecological ‘model organism’. Recently, genomic resources have been developed for the great tit, including a custom SNP chip and genetic linkage map. In this study, we used a suite of approaches to investigate the genetic architecture of eight quantitative traits in two long‐term study populations of great tits—one in the Netherlands and the other in the United Kingdom. Overall, we found little evidence for the presence of genes of large effects in either population. Instead, traits appeared to be influenced by many genes of small effect, with conservative estimates of the number of contributing loci ranging from 31 to 310. Despite concordance between population‐specific heritabilities, we found no evidence for the presence of loci having similar effects in both populations. While population‐specific genetic architectures are possible, an undetected shared architecture cannot be rejected because of limited power to map loci of small and moderate effects. This study is one of few examples of genetic architecture analysis in replicated wild populations and highlights some of the challenges and limitations researchers will face when attempting similar molecular quantitative genetic studies in free‐living populations.},
  author       = {Santure, Anna W. and Poissant, Jocelyn and De Cauwer, Isabelle and van Oers, Kees and Robinson, Matthew Richard and Quinn, John L. and Groenen, Martien A. M. and Visser, Marcel E. and Sheldon, Ben C. and Slate, Jon},
  issn         = {0962-1083},
  journal      = {Molecular Ecology},
  pages        = {6148--6162},
  publisher    = {Wiley},
  title        = {{Replicated analysis of the genetic architecture of quantitative traits in two wild great tit populations}},
  doi          = {10.1111/mec.13452},
  volume       = {24},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7741,
  abstract     = {Phenotypes expressed in a social context are not only a function of the individual, but can also be shaped by the phenotypes of social partners. These social effects may play a major role in the evolution of cooperative breeding if social partners differ in the quality of care they provide and if individual carers adjust their effort in relation to that of other carers. When applying social effects models to wild study systems, it is also important to explore sources of individual plasticity that could masquerade as social effects. We studied offspring provisioning rates of parents and helpers in a wild population of long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus using a quantitative genetic framework to identify these social effects and partition them into genetic, permanent environment and current environment components. Controlling for other effects, individuals were consistent in their provisioning effort at a given nest, but adjusted their effort based on who was in their social group, indicating the presence of social effects. However, these social effects differed between years and social contexts, indicating a current environment effect, rather than indicating a genetic or permanent environment effect. While this study reveals the importance of examining environmental and genetic sources of social effects, the framework we present is entirely general, enabling a greater understanding of potentially important social effects within any ecological population.},
  author       = {Adams, Mark James and Robinson, Matthew Richard and Mannarelli, Maria-Elena and Hatchwell, Ben J.},
  issn         = {0962-8452},
  journal      = {Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences},
  number       = {1810},
  publisher    = {The Royal Society},
  title        = {{Social genetic and social environment effects on parental and helper care in a cooperatively breeding bird}},
  doi          = {10.1098/rspb.2015.0689},
  volume       = {282},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7742,
  abstract     = {Across-nation differences in the mean values for complex traits are common1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, but the reasons for these differences are unknown. Here we find that many independent loci contribute to population genetic differences in height and body mass index (BMI) in 9,416 individuals across 14 European countries. Using discovery data on over 250,000 individuals and unbiased effect size estimates from 17,500 sibling pairs, we estimate that 24% (95% credible interval (CI) = 9%, 41%) and 8% (95% CI = 4%, 16%) of the captured additive genetic variance for height and BMI, respectively, reflect population genetic differences. Population genetic divergence differed significantly from that in a null model (height, P < 3.94 × 10−8; BMI, P < 5.95 × 10−4), and we find an among-population genetic correlation for tall and slender individuals (r = −0.80, 95% CI = −0.95, −0.60), consistent with correlated selection for both phenotypes. Observed differences in height among populations reflected the predicted genetic means (r = 0.51; P < 0.001), but environmental differences across Europe masked genetic differentiation for BMI (P < 0.58).},
  author       = {Robinson, Matthew Richard and Hemani, Gibran and Medina-Gomez, Carolina and Mezzavilla, Massimo and Esko, Tonu and Shakhbazov, Konstantin and Powell, Joseph E and Vinkhuyzen, Anna and Berndt, Sonja I and Gustafsson, Stefan and Justice, Anne E and Kahali, Bratati and Locke, Adam E and Pers, Tune H and Vedantam, Sailaja and Wood, Andrew R and van Rheenen, Wouter and Andreassen, Ole A and Gasparini, Paolo and Metspalu, Andres and Berg, Leonard H van den and Veldink, Jan H and Rivadeneira, Fernando and Werge, Thomas M and Abecasis, Goncalo R and Boomsma, Dorret I and Chasman, Daniel I and de Geus, Eco J C and Frayling, Timothy M and Hirschhorn, Joel N and Hottenga, Jouke Jan and Ingelsson, Erik and Loos, Ruth J F and Magnusson, Patrik K E and Martin, Nicholas G and Montgomery, Grant W and North, Kari E and Pedersen, Nancy L and Spector, Timothy D and Speliotes, Elizabeth K and Goddard, Michael E and Yang, Jian and Visscher, Peter M},
  issn         = {1061-4036},
  journal      = {Nature Genetics},
  number       = {11},
  pages        = {1357--1362},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{Population genetic differentiation of height and body mass index across Europe}},
  doi          = {10.1038/ng.3401},
  volume       = {47},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{776,
  abstract     = {High-performance concurrent priority queues are essential for applications such as task scheduling and discrete event simulation. Unfortunately, even the best performing implementations do not scale past a number of threads in the single digits. This is because of the sequential bottleneck in accessing the elements at the head of the queue in order to perform a DeleteMin operation. In this paper, we present the SprayList, a scalable priority queue with relaxed ordering semantics. Starting from a non-blocking SkipList, the main innovation behind our design is that the DeleteMin operations avoid a sequential bottleneck by &quot;spraying&quot; themselves onto the head of the SkipList list in a coordinated fashion. The spraying is implemented using a carefully designed random walk, so that DeleteMin returns an element among the first O(plog3p) in the list, with high probability, where p is the number of threads. We prove that the running time of a DeleteMin operation is O(log3p), with high probability, independent of the size of the list. Our experiments show that the relaxed semantics allow the data structure to scale for high thread counts, comparable to a classic unordered SkipList. Furthermore, we observe that, for reasonably parallel workloads, the scalability benefits of relaxation considerably outweigh the additional work due to out-of-order execution.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Kopinsky, Justin and Li, Jerry and Shavit, Nir},
  pages        = {11 -- 20},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{The SprayList: A scalable relaxed priority queue}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2688500.2688523},
  volume       = {2015-January},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7765,
  abstract     = {We introduce a principle unique to disordered solids wherein the contribution of any bond to one global perturbation is uncorrelated with its contribution to another. Coupled with sufficient variability in the contributions of different bonds, this “independent bond-level response” paves the way for the design of real materials with unusual and exquisitely tuned properties. To illustrate this, we choose two global perturbations: compression and shear. By applying a bond removal procedure that is both simple and experimentally relevant to remove a very small fraction of bonds, we can drive disordered spring networks to both the incompressible and completely auxetic limits of mechanical behavior.},
  author       = {Goodrich, Carl Peter and Liu, Andrea J. and Nagel, Sidney R.},
  issn         = {0031-9007},
  journal      = {Physical Review Letters},
  number       = {22},
  publisher    = {American Physical Society},
  title        = {{The principle of independent bond-level response: Tuning by pruning to exploit disorder for global behavior}},
  doi          = {10.1103/physrevlett.114.225501},
  volume       = {114},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7766,
  abstract     = {We study the vibrational properties near a free surface of disordered spring networks derived from jammed sphere packings. In bulk systems, without surfaces, it is well understood that such systems have a plateau in the density of vibrational modes extending down to a frequency scale ω*. This frequency is controlled by ΔZ = 〈Z〉 − 2d, the difference between the average coordination of the spheres and twice the spatial dimension, d, of the system, which vanishes at the jamming transition. In the presence of a free surface we find that there is a density of disordered vibrational modes associated with the surface that extends far below ω*. The total number of these low-frequency surface modes is controlled by ΔZ, and the profile of their decay into the bulk has two characteristic length scales, which diverge as ΔZ−1/2 and ΔZ−1 as the jamming transition is approached.},
  author       = {Sussman, Daniel M. and Goodrich, Carl Peter and Liu, Andrea J. and Nagel, Sidney R.},
  issn         = {1744-683X},
  journal      = {Soft Matter},
  number       = {14},
  pages        = {2745--2751},
  publisher    = {Royal Society of Chemistry},
  title        = {{Disordered surface vibrations in jammed sphere packings}},
  doi          = {10.1039/c4sm02905d},
  volume       = {11},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{7767,
  abstract     = {We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type nearest-neighbor alignment, short-range repulsion, and a local boundary term. Changing the relative strength of these interactions leads to migrating swarms, rotating swarms, and jammed swarms, as well as swarms that exhibit run-and-tumble motion, alternating between migration and either rotating or jammed states. Interestingly, although a migrating swarm moves slower than an individual particle, the diffusion constant can be up to three orders of magnitude larger, suggesting that collective motion can be highly advantageous, for example, when searching for food.},
  author       = {van Drongelen, Ruben and Pal, Anshuman and Goodrich, Carl Peter and Idema, Timon},
  issn         = {1539-3755},
  journal      = {Physical Review E},
  number       = {3},
  publisher    = {American Physical Society},
  title        = {{Collective dynamics of soft active particles}},
  doi          = {10.1103/physreve.91.032706},
  volume       = {91},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{777,
  abstract     = {In many applications, the data is of rich structure that can be represented by a hypergraph, where the data items are represented by vertices and the associations among items are represented by hyperedges. Equivalently, we are given an input bipartite graph with two types of vertices: items, and associations (which we refer to as topics). We consider the problem of partitioning the set of items into a given number of components such that the maximum number of topics covered by a component is minimized. This is a clustering problem with various applications, e.g. partitioning of a set of information objects such as documents, images, and videos, and load balancing in the context of modern computation platforms.Inthis paper, we focus on the streaming computation model for this problem, in which items arrive online one at a time and each item must be assigned irrevocably to a component at its arrival time. Motivated by scalability requirements, we focus on the class of streaming computation algorithms with memory limited to be at most linear in the number of components. We show that a greedy assignment strategy is able to recover a hidden co-clustering of items under a natural set of recovery conditions. We also report results of an extensive empirical evaluation, which demonstrate that this greedy strategy yields superior performance when compared with alternative approaches.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Iglesias, Jennifer and Vojnović, Milan},
  pages        = {1900 -- 1908},
  publisher    = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  title        = {{Streaming min-max hypergraph partitioning}},
  volume       = {2015-January},
  year         = {2015},
}

@unpublished{7779,
  abstract     = {The fact that a disordered material is not constrained in its properties in
the same way as a crystal presents significant and yet largely untapped
potential for novel material design. However, unlike their crystalline
counterparts, disordered solids are not well understood. One of the primary
obstacles is the lack of a theoretical framework for thinking about disorder
and its relation to mechanical properties. To this end, we study an idealized
system of frictionless athermal soft spheres that, when compressed, undergoes a
jamming phase transition with diverging length scales and clean power-law
signatures. This critical point is the cornerstone of a much larger "jamming
scenario" that has the potential to provide the essential theoretical
foundation necessary for a unified understanding of the mechanics of disordered
solids. We begin by showing that jammed sphere packings have a valid linear
regime despite the presence of "contact nonlinearities." We then investigate
the critical nature of the transition, focusing on diverging length scales and
finite-size effects. Next, we argue that jamming plays the same role for
disordered solids as the perfect crystal plays for crystalline solids. Not only
can it be considered an idealized starting point for understanding disordered
materials, but it can even influence systems that have a relatively high amount
of crystalline order. The behavior of solids can thus be thought of as existing
on a spectrum, with the perfect crystal and the jamming transition at opposing
ends. Finally, we introduce a new principle wherein the contribution of an
individual bond to one global property is independent of its contribution to
another. This principle allows the different global responses of a disordered
system to be manipulated independently and provides a great deal of flexibility
in designing materials with unique, textured and tunable properties.},
  author       = {Goodrich, Carl Peter},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{Unearthing the anticrystal: Criticality in the linear response of  disordered solids}},
  doi          = {10.48550/arXiv.1510.08820},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{778,
  abstract     = {Several Hybrid Transactional Memory (HyTM) schemes have recently been proposed to complement the fast, but best-effort nature of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) with a slow, reliable software backup. However, the costs of providing concurrency between hardware and software transactions in HyTM are still not well understood. In this paper, we propose a general model for HyTM implementations, which captures the ability of hardware transactions to buffer memory accesses. The model allows us to formally quantify and analyze the amount of overhead (instrumentation) caused by the potential presence of software transactions.We prove that (1) it is impossible to build a strictly serializable HyTM implementation that has both uninstrumented reads and writes, even for very weak progress guarantees, and (2) the instrumentation cost incurred by a hardware transaction in any progressive opaque HyTM is linear in the size of the transaction’s data set.We further describe two implementations which exhibit optimal instrumentation costs for two different progress conditions. In sum, this paper proposes the first formal HyTM model and captures for the first time the trade-off between the degree of hardware-software TM concurrency and the amount of instrumentation overhead.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Kopinsky, Justin and Kuznetsov, Petr and Ravi, Srivatsan and Shavit, Nir},
  pages        = {185 -- 199},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Inherent limitations of hybrid transactional memory}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_13},
  volume       = {9363},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{779,
  abstract     = {The concurrent memory reclamation problem is that of devising a way for a deallocating thread to verify that no other concurrent threads hold references to a memory block being deallocated. To date, in the absence of automatic garbage collection, there is no satisfactory solution to this problem; existing tracking methods like hazard pointers, reference counters, or epoch-based techniques like RCU, are either prohibitively expensive or require significant programming expertise, to the extent that implementing them efficiently can be worthy of a publication. None of the existing techniques are automatic or even semi-automated. In this paper, we take a new approach to concurrent memory reclamation: instead of manually tracking access to memory locations as done in techniques like hazard pointers, or restricting shared accesses to specific epoch boundaries as in RCU, our algorithm, called ThreadScan, leverages operating system signaling to automatically detect which memory locations are being accessed by concurrent threads. Initial empirical evidence shows that ThreadScan scales surprisingly well and requires negligible programming effort beyond the standard use of Malloc and Free.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Matveev, Alexander and Leiserson, William and Shavit, Nir},
  pages        = {123 -- 132},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{ThreadScan: Automatic and scalable memory reclamation}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2755573.2755600},
  volume       = {2015-June},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{780,
  abstract     = {Population protocols are networks of finite-state agents, interacting randomly, and updating their states using simple rules. Despite their extreme simplicity, these systems have been shown to cooperatively perform complex computational tasks, such as simulating register machines to compute standard arithmetic functions. The election of a unique leader agent is a key requirement in such computational constructions. Yet, the fastest currently known population protocol for electing a leader only has linear convergence time, and it has recently been shown that no population protocol using a constant number of states per node may overcome this linear bound. In this paper, we give the first population protocol for leader election with polylogarithmic convergence time, using polylogarithmic memory states per node. The protocol structure is quite simple: each node has an associated value, and is either a leader (still in contention) or a minion (following some leader). A leader keeps incrementing its value and “defeats” other leaders in one-to-one interactions, and will drop from contention and become a minion if it meets a leader with higher value. Importantly, a leader also drops out if it meets a minion with higher absolute value. While these rules are quite simple, the proof that this algorithm achieves polylogarithmic convergence time is non-trivial. In particular, the argument combines careful use of concentration inequalities with anti-concentration bounds, showing that the leaders’ values become spread apart as the execution progresses, which in turn implies that straggling leaders get quickly eliminated. We complement our analysis with empirical results, showing that our protocol converges extremely fast, even for large network sizes.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Gelashvili, Rati},
  pages        = {479 -- 491},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  title        = {{Polylogarithmic-time leader election in population protocols}},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-3-662-47666-6_38},
  volume       = {9135},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{781,
  abstract     = {Population protocols, roughly defined as systems consisting of large numbers of simple identical agents, interacting at random and updating their state following simple rules, are an important research topic at the intersection of distributed computing and biology. One of the fundamental tasks that a population protocol may solve is majority: each node starts in one of two states; the goal is for all nodes to reach a correct consensus on which of the two states was initially the majority. Despite considerable research effort, known protocols for this problem are either exact but slow (taking linear parallel time to converge), or fast but approximate (with non-zero probability of error). In this paper, we show that this trade-off between preciasion and speed is not inherent. We present a new protocol called Average and Conquer (AVC) that solves majority ex-actly in expected parallel convergence time O(log n/(sε) + log n log s), where n is the number of nodes, εn is the initial node advantage of the majority state, and s = Ω(log n log log n) is the number of states the protocol employs. This shows that the majority problem can be solved exactly in time poly-logarithmic in n, provided that the memory per node is s = Ω(1/ε + lognlog1/ε). On the negative side, we establish a lower bound of Ω(1/ε) on the expected paraallel convergence time for the case of four memory states per node, and a lower bound of Ω(logn) parallel time for protocols using any number of memory states per node.per node, and a lower bound of (log n) parallel time for protocols using any number of memory states per node.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Gelashvili, Rati and Vojnović, Milan},
  pages        = {47 -- 56},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Fast and exact majority in population protocols}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2767386.2767429},
  volume       = {2015-July},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{782,
  abstract     = {In this work, we consider the following random process, mo- Tivated by the analysis of lock-free concurrent algorithms under high memory contention. In each round, a new scheduling step is allocated to one of n threads, according to a distribution p = (p1; p2; : : : ; pn), where thread i is scheduled with probability pi. When some thread first reaches a set threshold of executed steps, it registers a win, completing its current operation, and resets its step count to 1. At the same time, threads whose step count was close to the threshold also get reset because of the win, but to 0 steps, being penalized for almost winning. We are interested in two questions: how often does some thread complete an operation (system latency), and how often does a specific thread complete an operation (individual latency)? We provide asymptotically tight bounds for the system and individual latency of this general concurrency pattern, for arbitrary scheduling distributions p. Surprisingly, a sim- ple characterization exists: in expectation, the system will complete a new operation every Θ(1/p 2) steps, while thread i will complete a new operation every Θ(1/2=p i ) steps. The proof is interesting in its own right, as it requires a careful analysis of how the higher norms of the vector p inuence the thread step counts and latencies in this random process. Our result offers a simple connection between the scheduling distribution and the average performance of concurrent algorithms, which has several applications.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Sauerwald, Thomas and Vojnović, Milan},
  pages        = {251 -- 260},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{Lock-Free algorithms under stochastic schedulers}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2767386.2767430},
  volume       = {2015-July},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{783,
  abstract     = {The problem of electing a leader from among n contenders is one of the fundamental questions in distributed computing. In its simplest formulation, the task is as follows: given n processors, all participants must eventually return a win or lose indication, such that a single contender may win. Despite a considerable amount of work on leader election, the following question is still open: can we elect a leader in an asynchronous fault-prone system faster than just running a Θ(log n)-time tournament, against a strong adaptive adversary? In this paper, we answer this question in the affirmative, improving on a decades-old upper bound. We introduce two new algorithmic ideas to reduce the time complexity of electing a leader to O(log∗ n), using O(n2) point-to-point messages. A non-trivial application of our algorithm is a new upper bound for the tight renaming problem, assigning n items to the n participants in expected O(log2 n) time and O(n2) messages. We complement our results with lower bound of Ω(n2) messages for solving these two problems, closing the question of their message complexity.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Gelashvili, Rati and Vladu, Adrian},
  pages        = {365 -- 374},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{How to elect a leader faster than a tournament}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2767386.2767420},
  volume       = {2015-July},
  year         = {2015},
}

@inproceedings{784,
  abstract     = {We demonstrate an optical switch design that can scale up to a thousand ports with high per-port bandwidth (25 Gbps+) and low switching latency (40 ns). Our design uses a broadcast and select architecture, based on a passive star coupler and fast tunable transceivers. In addition we employ time division multiplexing to achieve very low switching latency. Our demo shows the feasibility of the switch data plane using a small testbed, comprising two transmitters and a receiver, connected through a star coupler.},
  author       = {Alistarh, Dan-Adrian and Ballani, Hitesh and Costa, Paolo and Funnell, Adam and Benjamin, Joshua and Watts, Philip and Thomsen, Benn},
  isbn         = {978-1-4503-3542-3},
  location     = {London, United Kindgdom},
  pages        = {367 -- 368},
  publisher    = {ACM},
  title        = {{A high-radix, low-latency optical switch for data centers}},
  doi          = {10.1145/2785956.2790035},
  year         = {2015},
}

@article{802,
  abstract     = {Glycoinositolphosphoceramides (GIPCs) are complex sphingolipids present at the plasma membrane of various eukaryotes with the important exception of mammals. In fungi, these glycosphingolipids commonly contain an alpha-mannose residue (Man) linked at position 2 of the inositol. However, several pathogenic fungi additionally synthesize zwitterionic GIPCs carrying an alpha-glucosamine residue (GlcN) at this position. In the human pathogen Aspergillus fumigatus, the GlcNalpha1,2IPC core (where IPC is inositolphosphoceramide) is elongated to Manalpha1,3Manalpha1,6GlcNalpha1,2IPC, which is the most abundant GIPC synthesized by this fungus. In this study, we identified an A. fumigatus N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase, named GntA, and demonstrate its involvement in the initiation of zwitterionic GIPC biosynthesis. Targeted deletion of the gene encoding GntA in A. fumigatus resulted in complete absence of zwitterionic GIPC; a phenotype that could be reverted by episomal expression of GntA in the mutant. The N-acetylhexosaminyltransferase activity of GntA was substantiated by production of N-acetylhexosamine-IPC in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae upon GntA expression. Using an in vitro assay, GntA was furthermore shown to use UDP-N-acetylglucosamine as donor substrate to generate a glycolipid product resistant to saponification and to digestion by phosphatidylinositol-phospholipase C as expected for GlcNAcalpha1,2IPC. Finally, as the enzymes involved in mannosylation of IPC, GntA was localized to the Golgi apparatus, the site of IPC synthesis.},
  author       = {Engel, Jakob and Schmalhorst, Philipp S and Kruger, Anke and Muller, Christina and Buettner, Falk and Routier, Françoise},
  journal      = {Glycobiology},
  number       = {12},
  pages        = {1423 -- 1430},
  publisher    = {Oxford University Press},
  title        = {{Characterization of an N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase involved in Aspergillus fumigatus zwitterionic glycoinositolphosphoceramide biosynthesis}},
  doi          = {10.1093/glycob/cwv059},
  volume       = {25},
  year         = {2015},
}