Improving A Solution's Quality Through Parallel Processing

• Authors: Selim G. Akl;Stefan D. Bruda
• Venue: The Journal of Supercomputing
• Year: 2001

The primary purpose of parallel computation is the fast execution of computational tasks that are too slow to perform sequentially. However, it was shown recently that a second equally important motivation for using parallel computers exists: Within the paradigm of real-time computation, some classes of problems have the property that a solution to a problem in the class computed in parallel is better than the one obtained on a sequential computer. What represents a better solution depends on the problem under consideration. Thus, for optimization problems, ‘better’ means ‘closer to optimal’. Similarly, for numerical problems, a solution is ‘better’ than another one if it is ‘more accurate’. The present paper continues this line of inquiry by exploring another class enjoying the aforementioned property, namely, cryptographic problems in a real-time setting. In this class, ‘better’ means ‘more secure’. A real-time cryptographic problem is presented for which the parallel solution is provably, considerably, and consistently better than a sequential one.It is important to note that the purpose of this paper is not to demonstrate merely that a parallel computer can obtain a better solution to a computational problem than one derived sequentially. The latter is an interesting (and often surprising) observation in its own right, but we wish to go further. It is shown here that the improvement in quality can be arbitrarily high (and certainly superlinear in the number of processors used by the parallel computer). This result is akin to superlinear speedup—a phenomenon itself originally thought to be impossible.