Alek Westover

Email: alekw at mit dot edu

I am a student at MIT studying math and computer science. My research focuses on using combinatorics to design algorithms.

Blog

• hashing: Contemplations on what I enjoy about research.
• Truth: Contemplations on the importance of "working out the details carefully" in math.
• Girth: Some notes I took while reading literature on girth for a research project.
• Sketching: Notes on Sketching Algorithms, presented through dialogue of occasionally recurring characters of the blog.
• k-server on a circle: Attempting to solve a problem I read about in a paper.
• simply periodic binary functions: A neat number-theoretic bijection.

Publications

1. “New Memory Allocation Algorithms”.
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   To appear in Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2024)
   Maintain memory under item inserts and deletes, minimizing the overhead of moving other items.
2. “Choosing a Parallel or Serial Task Implementation”.
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   To appear in Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2024)
   On-line scheduling problem: receive tasks with serial and parallel implementations, have to choose what to run.
3. “On the Relationship Between Several Variants of the Linear Hashing Conjecture”
   Alek Westover
   Studied the expected maxload (number of items in the fullest bin) of several variants of linear hashing.
   Involved some neat elementary number theory and combinatorics.
4. “The Variable-Processor Cup Game”.
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   In 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021).
   Proved upper and lower bounds for a two player game involving filling and emptying cups.
   Presentation Slides
5. “Cache-Efficient Parallel-Partition Algorithms using Exclusive-Read-and-Write Memory.”
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2020).
   Designed and implemented a cache optimal randomized algorithm for the parallel partition problem.
   Visualization of the algorithm
   Parallel-Partition on GitHub

Tutoring Services

I enjoy helping people understand math and computer science. I offer private tutoring in the following subjects:

• Calculus
• Programming
• Algebra
• Linear Algebra
• Computer Science
• Combinatorics

Contact me for more information.