Andreas Jakoby, Maciej Liskiewicz, Rüdiger Reischuk:
The Expressive Power and Complexity of Dynamic Process Graphs.
Technical report SIIM-TR-A-00-07, 
		Schriftenreihe der Institute für Informatik/Mathematik der Universität zu Lübeck,
		2000.
		
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A  model for parallel and distributed programs, the dynamic process graph, 
is investigated under graph-theoretic and complexity aspects. Such graphs 
are capable of representing all possible executions of a parallel or 
distributed program in a very compact way. The size of this representation 
is small -- in many cases only logarithmic with respect to the size of any 
execution of the program. An important feature of this model is that 
the encoded executions are directed acyclic graphs with a regular structure, 
which is typical of parallel programs, and that it embeds constructors for 
parallel programs, synchronization mechanisms as well as conditional branches.
In a previous paper we have analysed the expressive power of the general 
model and various restrictions. Furthermore, from an algorithmic point 
of view it is important to decide whether a given dynamic process graph can 
be executed correctly and to estimate the minimal deadline given enough 
parallelism. Our model takes into account communication delays between 
processors when exchanging data.
In this paper we study a variant with output restriction. It is appropriate 
in many situations, but its expressive power has not been known exactly. 
First, we investigate structural properties of the executions of such dynamic 
process graphs G. A natural graph-theoretic conjecture that executions must 
always split into components isomorphic to subgraphs of G turns out to be 
wrong. We are able to establish a weaker property. This implies a quadratic 
bound on the maximal deadline in contrast to the general case, where 
the execution time may be exponential. However, we show that the problem 
to determine the minimal deadline is still intractable, namely this problem 
is NEXPTIME-complete as is the general case. The lower bound is obtained by 
showing that this kind of dynamic process graphs can represent certain 
Boolean formulas in a highly succinct way.
This is an extended abstract to be presented at 26th International Workshop 
on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science, Konstanz, Germany, 2000.