English

IterLara: A Turing Complete Algebra for Big Data, AI, Scientific Computing, and Database

Databases 2023-07-18 v1 Computation and Language Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

\textsc{Lara} is a key-value algebra that aims at unifying linear and relational algebra with three types of operation abstraction. The study of \textsc{Lara}'s expressive ability reports that it can represent relational algebra and most linear algebra operations. However, several essential computations, such as matrix inversion and determinant, cannot be expressed in \textsc{Lara}. \textsc{Lara} cannot represent global and iterative computation, either. This article proposes \textsc{IterLara}, extending \textsc{Lara} with iterative operators, to provide an algebraic model that unifies operations in general-purpose computing, like big data, AI, scientific computing, and database. We study the expressive ability of \textsc{Lara} and \textsc{IterLara} and prove that \textsc{IterLara} with aggregation functions can represent matrix inversion, determinant. Besides, we demonstrate that \textsc{IterLara} with no limitation of function utility is Turing complete. We also propose the Operation Count (OP) as a metric of computation amount for \textsc{IterLara} and ensure that the OP metric is in accordance with the existing computation metrics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.08315,
  title  = {IterLara: A Turing Complete Algebra for Big Data, AI, Scientific Computing, and Database},
  author = {Hongxiao Li and Wanling Gao and Lei Wang and Jianfeng Zhan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.08315},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:32:12.255Z