Basic Communication Primitives Research Articles

Experimental quantum secret sharing based on phase encoding of coherent states

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is one of the basic communication primitives in future quantum networks which addresses part of the basic cryptographic tasks of multiparty communication and computation. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to provide a practical QSS protocol with security against general attacks. A QSS protocol that balances security and practicality is still lacking. Here, we propose a QSS protocol with simple phase encoding of coherent states among three parties. Removing the requirement of impractical entangled resources and the need for phase randomization, our protocol can be implemented with accessible technology. We provide the finite-key analysis against coherent attacks and implement a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate our scheme's feasibility. Our scheme achieves a key rate of 85.3 bps under a 35 dB channel loss. Combined with security against general attacks and accessible technology, our protocol is a promising candidate for practical multiparty quantum communication networks.

RITAS: Services for Randomized Intrusion Tolerance

Randomized agreement protocols have been around for more than two decades. Often assumed to be inefficient due to their high expected communication and computation complexities, they have remained overlooked by the community-at-large as a valid solution for the deployment of fault-tolerant distributed systems. This paper aims to demonstrate that randomization can be a very competitive approach even in hostile environments where arbitrary faults can occur. A stack of randomized intrusion-tolerant protocols is described and its performance evaluated under several settings in both local-area-network (LAN) and wide-area-network environments. The stack provides a set of relevant services ranging from basic communication primitives up to atomic broadcast. The experimental evaluation shows that the protocols are efficient, especially in LAN environments where no performance reduction is observed under certain Byzantine faults.

Characterization of MPI Communication Primitives on a Heterogeneous Cluster

This paper focuses on the performance of basic communication primitives, namely the overlap of message transfer with computation in the point-to-point communication within a small cluster of four nodes. The mpptest has been implemented to measure the basic performance of MPI message passing routines with a variety of message sizes. The mpptest is capable of measuring performance with many participating processes thus exposing contention and scalability problems. This enables programmers to select message sizes in order to isolate and evaluate sudden changes in performance. Investigating these matters is interesting in that non-blocking calls have the advantage of allowing the system to schedule communications even when many processes are running simultaneously. On the other hand, understanding the characteristics of computation and communication overlap is significant, because high- performance kernels often strive to achieve this, since it is both advantageous with respect to data transfer and latency hiding. The results indicate that certain overlap sizes utilize greater node processing power either in blocking send and receive operations or non-blocking send and receive operations. The results have elucidated a detailed MPI characterization of the performance regarding the overlap of message transfer with computation in a small cluster system.

Benchmarking the computation and communication performance of the CM-5

Thinking Machines' CM-5 machine is a distributed-memory, message-passing computer. In the paper we devise a performance benchmark for the base and vector units and the data communication networks of the CM-5 machine. We model the communication characteristics such as communication latency and bandwidths of point-to-point and global communication primitives. We show, on a simple Gaussian elimination code, that an accurate static performance estimation of parallel algorithms is possible by using those basic machine properties connected with computation, vectorization, communication and synchronization. Futhermore, we describe the embedding of meshes or hypercubes on the CM-5 fat-tree topology and illustrate the performance results of their basic communication primitives.