Title
Finding the Minimal DFA of Very Large Finite State Automata with an Application to Token Passing Networks
Abstract
Finite state automata (FSA) are ubiquitous in computer science. Two of the most important algorithms for FSA processing are the conversion of a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) to a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), and then the production of the unique minimal DFA for the original NFA. We exhibit a parallel disk-based algorithm that uses a cluster of 29 commodity computers to produce an intermediate DFA with almost two billion states and then continues by producing the corresponding unique minimal DFA with less than 800,000 states. The largest previous such computation in the literature was carried out on a 512-processor CM-5 supercomputer in 1996. That computation produced an intermediate DFA with 525,000 states and an unreported number of states for the corresponding minimal DFA. The work is used to provide strong experimental evidence satisfying a conjecture on a series of token passing networks. The conjecture concerns stack sortable permutations for a finite stack and a 3-buffer. The origins of this problem lie in the work on restricted permutations begun by Knuth and Tarjan in the late 1960s. The parallel disk-based computation is also compared with both a single-threaded and multi-threaded RAM-based implementation using a 16-core 128 GB large shared memory computer.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2011
Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research
deterministic finite automaton,group theory,satisfiability,finite state automata,shared memory,cluster computing
Field
DocType
Volume
Quantum finite automata,Generalized nondeterministic finite automaton,Deterministic automaton,Nondeterministic finite automaton,Computer science,Deterministic finite automaton,Powerset construction,DFA minimization,ω-automaton,Distributed computing
Journal
abs/1103.5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.34
17
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vlad Slavici171.90
Daniel Kunkle2627.12
Gene Cooperman323328.60
Stephen Linton4161.77