Self-adjusting computation: (an overview)

Many applications need to respond to incremental modifications to data. Being incremental, such modification often require incremental modifications to the output, making it possible to respond to them asymptotically faster than recomputing from scratch. In many cases, taking advantage of incrementality therefore dramatically improves performance, especially as the input size increases. As a frame of reference, note that in parallel computing speedups are bounded by the number of processors, often a (small) constant. Designing and developing applications that respond to incremental modifications, however, is challenging: it often involves developing highly specific, complex algorithms. Self-adjusting computation offers a linguistic approach to this problem. In selfadjusting computation, programs respond automatically and efficiently to modifications to their data by tracking the dynamic data dependences of the computation and incrementally updating their output as needed. In th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PEPM
• Authors: Umut A. Acar
• Keywords: Incremental Modifications, Keywords Incremental Computation, PEPM 2009, Self-adjusting Computation, Software Engineering