(MIT: MA) -- At a time when the Internet puts an untold amount of information at anyone’s fingertips, automated scientific experiments churn out data faster than researchers can keep up with it, and communications networks can include billions of people, even the simplest computational tasks have the potential to grow and overwhelm a powerful supercomputer. But sometimes all that’s needed is just a percentage of the solution to a monstrous calculation. Biologists mining genomic data, for instance, might be interested in only a handful of genes.

At the Innovations in Computer Science conference at Tsinghua University earlier this year, MIT researchers, together with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, presented a new mathematical framework for finding such localized solutions to complex calculations. They applied their approach to some classic problems in computer science, which involve mathematical abstractions known as graphs.

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