48,470 research outputs found
Many-Task Computing and Blue Waters
This report discusses many-task computing (MTC) generically and in the
context of the proposed Blue Waters systems, which is planned to be the largest
NSF-funded supercomputer when it begins production use in 2012. The aim of this
report is to inform the BW project about MTC, including understanding aspects
of MTC applications that can be used to characterize the domain and
understanding the implications of these aspects to middleware and policies.
Many MTC applications do not neatly fit the stereotypes of high-performance
computing (HPC) or high-throughput computing (HTC) applications. Like HTC
applications, by definition MTC applications are structured as graphs of
discrete tasks, with explicit input and output dependencies forming the graph
edges. However, MTC applications have significant features that distinguish
them from typical HTC applications. In particular, different engineering
constraints for hardware and software must be met in order to support these
applications. HTC applications have traditionally run on platforms such as
grids and clusters, through either workflow systems or parallel programming
systems. MTC applications, in contrast, will often demand a short time to
solution, may be communication intensive or data intensive, and may comprise
very short tasks. Therefore, hardware and software for MTC must be engineered
to support the additional communication and I/O and must minimize task dispatch
overheads. The hardware of large-scale HPC systems, with its high degree of
parallelism and support for intensive communication, is well suited for MTC
applications. However, HPC systems often lack a dynamic resource-provisioning
feature, are not ideal for task communication via the file system, and have an
I/O system that is not optimized for MTC-style applications. Hence, additional
software support is likely to be required to gain full benefit from the HPC
hardware
A GPU-accelerated Branch-and-Bound Algorithm for the Flow-Shop Scheduling Problem
Branch-and-Bound (B&B) algorithms are time intensive tree-based exploration
methods for solving to optimality combinatorial optimization problems. In this
paper, we investigate the use of GPU computing as a major complementary way to
speed up those methods. The focus is put on the bounding mechanism of B&B
algorithms, which is the most time consuming part of their exploration process.
We propose a parallel B&B algorithm based on a GPU-accelerated bounding model.
The proposed approach concentrate on optimizing data access management to
further improve the performance of the bounding mechanism which uses large and
intermediate data sets that do not completely fit in GPU memory. Extensive
experiments of the contribution have been carried out on well known FSP
benchmarks using an Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPU card. We compared the obtained
performances to a single and a multithreaded CPU-based execution. Accelerations
up to x100 are achieved for large problem instances
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
Performance Analysis of Optimization Methods in PSE Applications. Mathematical Programming Versus Grid-based Multi-parametric Genetic Algorithms
Due to their large variety of applications in the PSE area, complex optimisation problems are of high interest for the scientific community. As a consequence, a great effort is made for developing efficient solution techniques. The choice of the relevant technique for the treatment of a given problem has already been studied for batch plant design issues. However,most works reported in the dedicated literature classically considered item sizes as continuous variables. In a view of realism, a similar approach is proposed in this paper, with discrete variables representing equipment capacities. The numerical results enable to evaluate the performances of two mathematical programming (MP) solvers embedded within the GAMS package and a genetic algorithm (GA), on a set of seven increasing complexity examples. The necessarily huge number of runs for the GA could be performed within a computational framework basedon a grid infrastructure; however, since the MP methods were tackled through single-computer computations, the CPU time comparison are reported for this one-PC working mode. On the one hand, the high combinatorial effect induced by the new discrete variables heavily penalizes the GAMS modules, DICOPTĂŸĂŸand SBB. On the other hand, the Genetic Algorithm proves its superiority, providing quality solutions within acceptable computational times, whatever the considered example
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