OP-Tools Add-In for Excel

• I wrote this Add-In for the Optimization course by Prof. Eric Denardo. Since there are two different platforms (Microsoft Windows and MAC OS X) and several different versions of Excel, I implemented two versions in VBA and AppleScript. For PC users with Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, MAC users with Excel 2004, please download this file. For MAC users with Excel 2008, please download this file. The instructions on how to install, activate and use the Add-In can be found here.

Cloud Computing Related

• Cloud Computing: An article taken from Communication of ACM, vol. 51(7), 2008.
• Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing: a discussion of the current view of cloud computing from Berkeley.
• Google's MapReduce Parallel Programming Model: a software framework supports distributed computing on large data sets on clusters of computers. The framework is inspired by map and reduce functions commonly used in functional programming, although their purpose in the MapReduce framework is not the same as their original forms.
  • [OSDI'04] MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, by J. Dean and S. Ghemawat
  • [PACT'06] Experiences with MapReduce, an abstraction for large-scale computation, by J. Dean
  • [SCP Journal'07] Google's MapReduce Programming Model -- Revisited, by R. Lammel
• Apache Hadoop: a free Java implementation of MapReduce in the open source software community. Apache Hadoop also provides a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. Yahoo! provides a detailed tutorial which is available here.
• Theoretical MapReduce Model: some simulation (PRAM, streaming) results achieved by MapReduce computation model.
  • [SODA'08] On Distributing Symmetric Streaming Computations, by J. Feldman, S. Muthukrishnan, A. Sidiropoulos, C. Stein and Z. Svitkina.
  • [SODA'10] A Model of Computation for MapReduce, by H. Karloff, S. Suri, and S. Vassilvitskii.
• Architecture, task scheduler: an research paper that focuses on the scheduler design in Hadoop, especially for scheduling speculative executions.
  • [OSDI'08] Improving MapReduce Performance in Heterogeneous Environments, by M. Zaharia, A. Konwinski, A. D. Joseph, R. Katz and I. Stoica
• Phoenix: a shared-memory implementation of Google's MapReduce model for data-intensive processing tasks, based on multi-core and multi-processor systems.
  • [HPCA'07] Evaluating MapReduce for Multi-core and Multiprocessor Systems, by C. Ranger, R. Raghuraman, A. Penmetsa, G. Bradski and C. Kozyrakis
• Cell B.E. Architecture: MapReduce programming model implementation on the Cell B.E. processor architecture.
  • [WISC CS-TR-2007-1625] MapReduce for the Cell B.E. Architecture, by M. Kruijf and K. Sankaralingam
• Mars: a MapReduce framework implemented on graphic processors (GPUs) using NVIDIA CUDA 1.0.
  • [PACT'08] Mars: A MapReduce Framework on Graphics Processors, by B. He, W. Fang, Q. Luo, N. K. Govindaraju, and T. Wang

Good Survey Articles

• Assignment problems: A golden anniversary survey, by David W. Pentico. A survey of assignment problems, indentifying different variations of the assignment problem in the literature.
• Cell Probe Complexity - a Survey, by Peter Bro Miltersen. A survey of the cell probe complexity of static and dynamic data structure problems, with an emphasis on techniques for proving lower bounds.
• Data streams: Algorithms and applications, by S. Muthukrishnan. A recent survey of data streaming model.
• Hundreds of impossibility results for distributed computing, by Faith Fich, and Eric Ruppert. A survey of results from distributed computing that show tasks to be impossible. Many useful proof techniques are covered by this survey.
• Sorting and searching on the word RAM, by Torben Hagerup. A survey of the fast algorithms for sorting and searching on a random access memory with word length of w bits, for some w.

Useful Links

• Google Scholar: a search of scholarly literature across many disciplines and sources, including theses, books, abstracts and articles.
• "Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis.
• "You've got to find what you love" & "Stay hungry, stay foolish": Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address [Text][Video].
• Interview Questions: a collection of software and hardware interview questions from various companies (Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Google, Intel, HP, etc.). Some of them are really interesting from the algorithmic and intelligent point of view.
• Conference Information: conference rankings (informal) and calendar, by Mohammad Farshi.
• LaTeX Wiki: many useful information for LaTeX.
• TeX Ample: ample resources for TeX users.
• Complexity Zoo: complexity wiki.
• Computational Complexity Blog: a wonderful discussion forum for theory computer scientisits.

(Last updated on 02/04/2010)