Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2507.01298

Optimal Dispersion Under Asynchrony

Abstract

We study the dispersion problem in anonymous port-labeled graphs: $k \leq n$ mobile agents, each with a unique ID and initially located arbitrarily on the nodes of an $n$-node graph with maximum degree $Δ$, must autonomously relocate so that no node hosts more than one agent. Dispersion serves as a fundamental task in distributed computing of mobile agents, and its complexity stems from key challenges in local coordination under anonymity and limited memory. The goal is to minimize both the time to achieve dispersion and the memory required per agent. It is known that any algorithm requires $Ω(k)$ time in the worst case, and $Ω(\log k)$ bits of memory per agent. A recent result [SPAA'25] gives an optimal $O(k)$-time algorithm in the synchronous setting and an $O(k \log k)$-time algorithm in the asynchronous setting, both using $O(\log(k+Δ))$ bits. In this paper, we close the complexity gap in the asynchronous setting by presenting the first dispersion algorithm that runs in optimal $O(k)$ time using $O(\log(k+Δ))$ bits of memory per agent. Our solution is based on a novel technique we develop in this paper that constructs a port-one tree in anonymous graphs, which may be of independent interest.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Debasish Pattanayak, Ajay D. Kshemkalyani, Manish Kumar, Anisur Rahaman Molla, Gokarna Sharma. 2025-07-02. Optimal Dispersion Under Asynchrony. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01298

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Weave: Fine-Grained Dynamic SM Scheduling in an MoE Megakernel for Compute-Communication Overlap

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) inference under expert parallelism (EP) turns each MoE layer into a distributed computation with costly dispatch and combine communication. State-of-the-art systems reduce this cost through communication-computation overlap, splitting the GPU's SMs for communication and computation respectively. However, this approach still leaves GPU resources wasted along two dimensions. Spatially, the best SM split is determined by each layer's routing result and varies across layers and GPUs, so fixed policies mismatch the workload and waste either NVLink bandwidth or compute throughput. Temporally, complex MoE data dependencies introduce bubbles that leave SMs idle. We present Weave, to our knowledge the first MoE overlap system that performs fine-grained dynamic SM scheduling - deciding per layer and per GPU by routing results at runtime. Once routing completes, each layer's communication and computation volumes become known; Weave exploits this predictability through a lightweight cost model running inside the persistent megakernel: a spatial scheduler partitions SMs into communication workers and computation workers to match the communication/computation throughput ratio, and a temporal scheduler coordinates the two worker groups to minimize SM idleness. On 4x H100 SXM GPUs across six mainstream MoE models, Weave achieves a 2.89x geometric-mean MoE-layer speedup and a 1.33x geometric-mean end-to-end speedup over five state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.DC↗

pytest-gpu-proof: Enabling Cloud-CPU Continuous Integration for GPU Code with Local GPU Attestation

GPU acceleration is now routine across robotics, but cloud-hosted GPU continuous integration (CI) runners are expensive, resulting in severe under-testing of GPU-accelerated code. We present pytest-gpu-proof, an open-source pytest plugin offering a practical middle ground. Tests can be run on a local machine, signed with a receipt of exactly what ran and what it produced, and integrated into standard CPU CI workflows (e.g., GitHub Actions). The tool is open source and on PyPI, and we are actively integrating it across our lab's software stack.

cs.DC↗

When Fancy Eviction Fails: Rethinking Cache Replacement For LLM Prefix Reuse

Long-running LLM applications repeatedly send growing context, making prefix caching critical for reducing prefill cost. Yet prefix-cache behavior under agentic workloads remains poorly understood. We study production traces from two companies and evaluate 14 eviction algorithms across HBM-constrained and large memory-pool settings. Despite a large gap to Belady, sophisticated policies designed for traditional caches provide little benefit over LRU. The reason is structural: prefix reuse is dominated by the regular pacing of active sessions, making recency unusually predictive. Prefix caching nevertheless introduces new challenges, including heavy-tailed session footprints and highly variable miss costs as attention computation grows with sequence length. We introduce the compute-savings ratio and two offline oracles to quantify these effects. Our results show that effective prefix-cache management should retain recency as its foundation while selectively adding quick demotion for one-hit prefixes, compute-aware partial eviction for expensive misses, and capacity-dependent eviction granularity. We will release the traces and simulator to support future research.

cs.DC↗