In this work we develop a new algorithm for regularized empirical risk minimization. Our method extends recent techniques of Shalev-Shwartz [02/2015], which enable a dual-free analysis of SDCA, to arbitrary mini-batching schemes. Moreover, our method is able to better utilize the information in the data defining the ERM problem. For convex loss functions, our complexity results match those of Q...

In this work we investigate the problem of order batching and picker routing in storage areas. These are labour and capital intensive problems, often responsible for a substantial share of warehouse operating costs. In particular, we consider the case of online grocery shopping in which orders may be composed of dozens of items. We present a formulation for the problem based on an exponential n...

Parallel video servers provide highly scalable video-on-demand service for a huge number of clients. The conventional streamscheduling scheme does not use I/O and network bandwidth efficiently. Some other schemes, such as batching and streammerging, can effectively improve server I/O and network bandwidth efficiency. However, the batching scheme results in long startup latency and high reneging...

The key performance bottleneck for large-scale video-on-demand (VoD) systems is the server bandwidth, which controls the number of clients a video server can support. Two existing stream scheduling schemes can save server bandwidth significantly by using multicast method to transmit video data: the batching scheme and the patching scheme. However, the batching scheme results in long start-up la...

We examine the reduction in efficiency in a system where each processor has a sequence of tasks and must synchronize with other processors after each task is done. This occurs, for example, in many stepwise simulations. In OpenMP, the only explicit synchronization is the barrier, which causes all processors to wait for the slowest one. This is problematic when the tasks take variable amounts of...

In many applications, it is desirable to work with signatures that are short, and yet wheremanymessages from different signers be verified very quickly. RSA signatures satisfy the latter condition, but are generally thousands of bits in length. Recent developments in pairing-based cryptography produced a number of “short” signatures which provide equivalent security in a fraction of the space. ...

A true Video-on-Demand (VOD) system provides the ultimate flexibility in video services by allowing users to select any video programs, at any time, and to perform any VCR-like user interactions. To allow true VOD, one approach is to have a dedicated video stream for each customer. This is expensive, especially when multiple identical video streams are sent to multiple customers accessing the s...

We study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth convex functions penalized with a strongly convex regularizer. We propose and analyze a novel primal-dual method (Quartz) which at every iteration samples and updates a random subset of the dual variables, chosen according to an arbitrary distribution. In contrast to typical analysis, we directly bound the decrease of th...