This thesis presents Granola, a transaction coordination infrastructure for building reliable distributed storage applications. Granola provides a strong consistency model, while significantly reducing transaction coordination overhead. Granola supports general atomic operations, enabling it to be used as a platform on which to build various storage systems, e.g., databases or object stores. We...

We consider the communication complexity of secure multiparty computations by networks of processors each with unlimited computing power. Say that an n-party protocol for a function of m bits is efficient if it uses a constant number of rounds of communication and a total number of message bits that is polynomial in max(m, n). We show that any function has an efficient protocol that achieves (r...

In this paper we discuss several techniques for reducing the overhead in Fortran-like DO loops. In particular, we describe two topics: 1. Simplifying loop bounds. 2. Removing a ne IF-statements from loops. The objective is to isolate the part of the iteration space of the original loop in which the bounds take simpler forms, or in which the condition is satis ed. The main technical tool for det...

8.17 Some Mechanical Principles Introduction Electric power can be transmitted or dis tributed either by means of underground cables or by overhead lines. The underground* cables are rarely used for power transmission due to two main reasons. Firstly, power is generally transmitted over long distances to load centres. Obviously, the installation costs for underground transmission will be very h...