A Parallel Interval Method Implementation for Global Optimization using Dynamic Load Balancing

During the past few years the interest paid to global opt imization has rapidly increased. One of the main reasons is the new technology of parallel computers which offer computational power capable of solving global optimization problems in reasonable time. The method studied in this work is based on interval analysis which provides a reliable way for solving the problem. Despite the fact that the method contains a high degree of potential parallelism, it is not straight forward to parallelize due to its irregular and unpredictable computational behaviour. This paper deals with the problem of balancing the load dynamically, both with respect to the quantity and to the quality of the tasks. Efficient strategies are proposed and implemented on an Intel iPSC/2 hypercube. Since the sequential algorithm is used as a base it will be modified to suit the parallel algorithm. Key words. Parallel computing, Global optimization, Interval computations, Dynamic load balancing. 38 Paper I 1 Intro..