Applying iterative solvers on sparsity-constrained optimization (SCO) requires tedious mathematical deduction and careful programming/debugging that hinders these solvers' broad impact. In the paper, the library skscope is introduced to overcome such an obstacle. With skscope, users can solve the SCO by just programming the objective function. The convenience of skscope is demonstrated through two examples in the paper, where sparse linear regression and trend filtering are addressed with just four lines of code. More importantly, skscope's efficient implementation allows state-of-the-art solvers to quickly attain the sparse solution regardless of the high dimensionality of parameter space. Numerical experiments reveal the available solvers in skscope can achieve up to 80x speedup on the competing relaxation solutions obtained via the benchmarked convex solver. skscope is published on the Python Package Index (PyPI) and Conda, and its source code is available at: https://github.com/abess-team/skscope.

We study distributed causal shared memory (or distributed read/write objects) in the client-server model over asynchronous message-passing networks in which some servers may suffer Byzantine failures. Since Ahamad et al. proposed causal memory in 1994, there have been abundant research on causal storage. Lately, there is a renewed interest in enforcing causal consistency in large-scale distributed storage systems (e.g., COPS, Eiger, Bolt-on). However, to the best of our knowledge, the fault-tolerance aspect of causal memory is not well studied, especially on the tight resilience bound. In our prior work, we showed that 2 f+1 servers is the tight bound to emulate crash-tolerant causal shared memory when up to f servers may crash. In this paper, we adopt a typical model considered in many prior works on Byzantine-tolerant storage algorithms and quorum systems. In the system, up to f servers may suffer Byzantine failures and any number of clients may crash. We constructively present an emulation algorithm for Byzantine causal memory using 3 f+1 servers. We also prove that 3 f+1 is necessary for tolerating up to f Byzantine servers. In other words, we show that 3 f+1 is a tight bound. For evaluation, we implement our algorithm in Golang and compare their performance with two state-of-the-art fault-tolerant algorithms that ensure atomicity in the Google Cloud Platform.

We study distributed causal shared memory (or key-value pairs) in an asynchronous network under crash failures. Causal memory, introduced by Ahamad et al. in the context of multi-processor environment in 1994, is an abstraction which ensures that nodes agree on the relative ordering of read and write operations that are causally related on key-value pairs. Inspired by the recent interests in geo-replicated causal storage systems (e.g., COPS, Eiger, Bolt-on), we systematically study the fault-tolerance property of the causal shared memory in the client-server model in this work. We identify that 2f + 1 servers is both necessary and sufficient to build a resilient causal memory in the presence of up to f crashed servers. We provide both the necessity proof and a new optimal algorithm that matches the bound. For evaluation, we implement our algorithm in Golang and compare the performance with state-of-the-art fault-tolerant algorithms that ensure strong consistency in the Google Cloud Platform.