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1. Server-Aided Anonymous Credentials

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-01887-8_10  

   Chairattana-Apirom, Rutchathon; Harding, Franklin; Lysyanskaya, Anna; Tessaro, Stefano (January 2025, Springer Nature Switzerland)
2. Secure and Server-User Private Linear Function Retrieval in Multi-Server Multi-User Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC42927.2021.9500850  

   Yan, Qifa; Tuninetti, Daniela (June 2021, ICC 2021 - IEEE International Conference on Communications,)

   null (Ed.)
3. Stability of Parallel Server Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2021.2125  

   Moyal, Pascal; Perry, Ohad (July 2022, Operations Research)

   The fundamental problem in the study of parallel-server systems is that of finding and analyzing routing policies of arriving jobs to the servers that efficiently balance the load on the servers. The most well-studied policies are (in decreasing order of efficiency) join the shortest workload (JSW), which assigns arrivals to the server with the least workload; join the shortest queue (JSQ), which assigns arrivals to the smallest queue; the power-of-[Formula: see text] (PW([Formula: see text])), which assigns arrivals to the shortest among [Formula: see text] queues that are sampled from the total of [Formula: see text] queues uniformly at random; and uniform routing, under which arrivals are routed to one of the [Formula: see text] queues uniformly at random. In this paper we study the stability problem of parallel-server systems, assuming that routing errors may occur, so that arrivals may be routed to the wrong queue (not the smallest among the relevant queues) with a positive probability. We treat this routing mechanism as a probabilistic routing policy, named a [Formula: see text]-allocation policy, that generalizes the PW([Formula: see text]) policy, and thus also the JSQ and uniform routing, where [Formula: see text] is an [Formula: see text]-dimensional vector whose components are the routing probabilities. Our goal is to study the (in)stability problem of the system under this routing mechanism, and under its “nonidling” version, which assigns new arrivals to an idle server, if such a server is available, and otherwise routes according to the [Formula: see text]-allocation rule. We characterize a sufficient condition for stability, and prove that the stability region, as a function of the system’s primitives and [Formula: see text], is in general smaller than the set [Formula: see text]. Our analyses build on representing the queue process as a continuous-time Markov chain in an ordered space of [Formula: see text]-dimensional real-valued vectors, and using a generalized form of the Schur-convex order. 

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4. The Einstein Toolkit Tutorial Server

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10028524  

   Brandt, Steven; Haas, Roland (October 2023, Science Gateways 2023 Annual Conference)

   The Einstein Toolkit is a complex software system for numerical general relativity, a science domain that includes colliding black holes, neutron stars, supernovae, etc. As might be expected for a framework of this size and age (parts of it are over 20 years old), there is a significant learning curve to building it, running it, writing new modules for it, etc. Over the years, the Einstein Toolkit maintainers have given a number of tutorials for new users. In recent years, we have created a tutorial server which allows us to streamline the teaching/learning process through the use of Jupyter notebooks and docker images. In this paper we describe the special considerations and adaptations required by the image and the notebook server that enable us to (1) easily make logins and manage accounts which streamlines both the classroom and the independent study experiences, (2) create a simplified but natural user experience for compiling and developing a complex C++ application, (3) scale to increasing class sizes. 

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5. One Server for the Price of Two: Simple and Fast Single-Server Private Information Retrieval

   Henzinger, Alexandra; Hong, Matthew M.; Corrigan-Gibbs, Henry; Meiklejohn, Sarah; Vaikuntanathan, Vinod (January 2023, USENIX Security Symposium)

   We present SimplePIR, the fastest single-server private information retrieval scheme known to date. SimplePIR’s security holds under the learning-with-errors assumption. To answer a client’s query, the SimplePIR server performs fewer than one 32-bit multiplication and one 32-bit addition per database byte. SimplePIR achieves 10 GB/s/core server throughput, which approaches the memory bandwidth of the machine and the performance of the fastest two-server private-information-retrieval schemes (which require non-colluding servers). SimplePIR has relatively large communication costs: to make queries to a 1 GB database, the client must download a 121 MB "hint" about the database contents; thereafter, the client may make an unbounded number of queries, each requiring 242 KB of communication. We present a second single-server scheme, DoublePIR, that shrinks the hint to 16 MB at the cost of slightly higher per-query communication (345 KB) and slightly lower throughput (7.4 GB/s/core). Finally, we apply our new private-information-retrieval schemes, together with a novel data structure for approximate set membership, to the task of private auditing in Certificate Transparency. We achieve a strictly stronger notion of privacy than Google Chrome’s current approach with modest communication overheads: 16 MB of download per month, along with 150 bytes per TLS connection. 

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