Assessing hyper parameter optimization and speedup for convolutional neural networks

The increased processing power of graphical processing units (GPUs) and the availability of large image datasets has fostered a renewed interest in extracting semantic information from images. Promising results for complex image categorization problems have been achieved using deep learning, with neural networks comprised of many layers. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are one such architecture which provides more opportunities for image classification. Advances in CNN enable the development of training models using large labelled image datasets, but the hyper parameters need to be specified, which is challenging and complex due to the large number of parameters. A substantial amount of computational power and processing time is required to determine the optimal hyper parameters to define a model yielding good results. This article provides a survey of the hyper parameter search and optimization methods for CNN architectures

A Survey on Compiler Autotuning using Machine Learning

Since the mid-1990s, researchers have been trying to use machine-learning based approaches to solve a number of different compiler optimization problems. These techniques primarily enhance the quality of the obtained results and, more importantly, make it feasible to tackle two main compiler optimization problems: optimization selection (choosing which optimizations to apply) and phase-ordering (choosing the order of applying optimizations). The compiler optimization space continues to grow due to the advancement of applications, increasing number of compiler optimizations, and new target architectures. Generic optimization passes in compilers cannot fully leverage newly introduced optimizations and, therefore, cannot keep up with the pace of increasing options. This survey summarizes and classifies the recent advances in using machine learning for the compiler optimization field, particularly on the two major problems of (1) selecting the best optimizations and (2) the phase-ordering of optimizations. The survey highlights the approaches taken so far, the obtained results, the fine-grain classification among different approaches and finally, the influential papers of the field.Comment: version 5.0 (updated on September 2018)- Preprint Version For our Accepted Journal @ ACM CSUR 2018 (42 pages) - This survey will be updated quarterly here (Send me your new published papers to be added in the subsequent version) History: Received November 2016; Revised August 2017; Revised February 2018; Accepted March 2018

Application of Pattern Search Method to Power System Economic Load Dispatch

Direct Search (DS) methods are evolutionary algorithms used to solve constrained optimization problems. DS methods do not require information about the gradient of the objective function while searching for an optimum solution. One of such methods is Pattern Search (PS) algorithm. This study examines the usefulness of a constrained pattern search algorithm to solve well-known power system Economic Load Dispatch problem (ELD) with a valve-point effect. For illustrative purposes, the proposed PS technique has been applied to various test systems to validate its effectiveness. Furthermore, convergence characteristics and robustness of the proposed method have been assessed and investigated through comparison with results reported in literature. The outcome is very encouraging and suggests that pattern search (PS) may be very useful in solving power system economic load dispatch problems

Adaptive Dispatching of Tasks in the Cloud

The increasingly wide application of Cloud Computing enables the consolidation of tens of thousands of applications in shared infrastructures. Thus, meeting the quality of service requirements of so many diverse applications in such shared resource environments has become a real challenge, especially since the characteristics and workload of applications differ widely and may change over time. This paper presents an experimental system that can exploit a variety of online quality of service aware adaptive task allocation schemes, and three such schemes are designed and compared. These are a measurement driven algorithm that uses reinforcement learning, secondly a "sensible" allocation algorithm that assigns jobs to sub-systems that are observed to provide a lower response time, and then an algorithm that splits the job arrival stream into sub-streams at rates computed from the hosts' processing capabilities. All of these schemes are compared via measurements among themselves and with a simple round-robin scheduler, on two experimental test-beds with homogeneous and heterogeneous hosts having different processing capacities.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure