Distributed computation on the MacLustr cluster

Beyond the Square-Root Barrier: Automated Discovery of Algebraic and Algorithmic Shortcuts in Bitcoin Cryptography

A hypothesis-driven, reproducible study of secp256k1, ECDSA, BIP340 Schnorr and SHA-256 with machine-checked identities and controlled negative results

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v1.0

Bitcoin's security rests on the elliptic-curve discrete-logarithm problem on secp256k1, on SHA-256, and on the ECDSA and BIP340 Schnorr signature schemes. The generic cost of the discrete logarithm, Θ(√n), is a theorem in the generic-group model; the curve's unusual structure, a special prime, j-invariant 0 and…

TITAN-MoE: Topology-Aware and Predictive Expert Orchestration for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts Inference on Apple Silicon

A Measured Systems Study on a Heterogeneous Mac Cluster

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v0.1

Sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) language models touch only a few experts per token, so a model whose weights exceed a machine's memory can still be served if the right experts are in the right place at the right time. This preliminary working paper reports the design, implementation and measurement of TITAN-MoE, an…

Beyond Text: Cache Compression and Knowledge Transfer in Multi-Agent Systems

A Reproducible Study of Fidelity, Communication Cost, and Repeated Handoffs

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

Agents built on language models hand information to one another as text, summaries, structured evidence, shared-memory references or, when they share a checkpoint, attention state (the KV cache). This paper asks under which task, model, cache, network and reuse conditions each representation preserves task-relevant…

Beyond One-Step Distributed Maximum Likelihood: Local Bias Cancellation, Global Synchronization, and the Price of Inexact Curvature

A joint order–round frontier, its sharpness in an exact model, and measured communication costs

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

Distributed maximum likelihood estimation trades statistical efficiency for communication. The paper studies a two-phase protocol in which each of K workers corrects the bias of its local maximum likelihood estimator by an r-th order split-sample extrapolation over nested sub-blocks, the coordinator averages the…

From Corporate Disclosures to a Russell 3000 Strategic Project Database: Identification, Measurement, Validation, and Research Applications

Manel Kammoun, Djerrycharli Tandjambianda and Simon-Pierre Boucher · FIRC Research Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

This paper documents the construction of SPID, a project-level research database that reconstructs the strategic initiatives disclosed by U.S.-listed companies in their SEC filings. Starting from an issuer universe that merges a current S&P 500 snapshot with the holdings of the iShares Russell 3000 ETF (2,564 distinct…