17,253 research outputs found
Implementation of a fixing strategy and parallelization in a recent global optimization method
Electromagnetism-like Mechanism (EM) heuristic is a population-based stochastic global optimization method inspired by the attraction-repulsion mechanism of the electromagnetism theory. EM was originally proposed for solving continuous global optimization problems with bound constraints and it has been shown that the algorithm performs quite well compared to some other global optimization methods. In this work, we propose two extensions to improve the performance of the original algorithm: First, we introduce a fixing strategy that provides a mechanism for not being trapped in local minima, and thus, improves the effectiveness of the search. Second, we use the proposed fixing strategy to parallelize the algorithm and utilize a cooperative parallel search on the solution space. We then evaluate the performance of our study under three criteria: the quality of the solutions, the number of function evaluations and the number of local minima obtained. Test problems are generated by an algorithm suggested in the literature that builds test problems with varying degrees of difficulty. Finally, we benchmark our results with that of the
Knitro solver with the multistart option set
Ergonomic Chair Design by Fusing Qualitative and Quantitative Criteria using Interactive Genetic Algorithms
This paper emphasizes the necessity of formally bringing qualitative and
quantitative criteria of ergonomic design together, and provides a novel
complementary design framework with this aim. Within this framework, different
design criteria are viewed as optimization objectives; and design solutions are
iteratively improved through the cooperative efforts of computer and user. The
framework is rooted in multi-objective optimization, genetic algorithms and
interactive user evaluation. Three different algorithms based on the framework
are developed, and tested with an ergonomic chair design problem. The parallel
and multi-objective approaches show promising results in fitness convergence,
design diversity and user satisfaction metrics
Maximum Resilience of Artificial Neural Networks
The deployment of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in safety-critical
applications poses a number of new verification and certification challenges.
In particular, for ANN-enabled self-driving vehicles it is important to
establish properties about the resilience of ANNs to noisy or even maliciously
manipulated sensory input. We are addressing these challenges by defining
resilience properties of ANN-based classifiers as the maximal amount of input
or sensor perturbation which is still tolerated. This problem of computing
maximal perturbation bounds for ANNs is then reduced to solving mixed integer
optimization problems (MIP). A number of MIP encoding heuristics are developed
for drastically reducing MIP-solver runtimes, and using parallelization of
MIP-solvers results in an almost linear speed-up in the number (up to a certain
limit) of computing cores in our experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness
and scalability of our approach by means of computing maximal resilience bounds
for a number of ANN benchmark sets ranging from typical image recognition
scenarios to the autonomous maneuvering of robots.Comment: Timestamp research work conducted in the project. version 2: fix some
typos, rephrase the definition, and add some more existing wor
Towards parallelizable sampling-based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control
This paper proposes a new sampling-based nonlinear model predictive control
(MPC) algorithm, with a bound on complexity quadratic in the prediction horizon
N and linear in the number of samples. The idea of the proposed algorithm is to
use the sequence of predicted inputs from the previous time step as a warm
start, and to iteratively update this sequence by changing its elements one by
one, starting from the last predicted input and ending with the first predicted
input. This strategy, which resembles the dynamic programming principle, allows
for parallelization up to a certain level and yields a suboptimal nonlinear MPC
algorithm with guaranteed recursive feasibility, stability and improved cost
function at every iteration, which is suitable for real-time implementation.
The complexity of the algorithm per each time step in the prediction horizon
depends only on the horizon, the number of samples and parallel threads, and it
is independent of the measured system state. Comparisons with the fmincon
nonlinear optimization solver on benchmark examples indicate that as the
simulation time progresses, the proposed algorithm converges rapidly to the
"optimal" solution, even when using a small number of samples.Comment: 9 pages, 9 pictures, submitted to IFAC World Congress 201
Polly's Polyhedral Scheduling in the Presence of Reductions
The polyhedral model provides a powerful mathematical abstraction to enable
effective optimization of loop nests with respect to a given optimization goal,
e.g., exploiting parallelism. Unexploited reduction properties are a frequent
reason for polyhedral optimizers to assume parallelism prohibiting dependences.
To our knowledge, no polyhedral loop optimizer available in any production
compiler provides support for reductions. In this paper, we show that
leveraging the parallelism of reductions can lead to a significant performance
increase. We give a precise, dependence based, definition of reductions and
discuss ways to extend polyhedral optimization to exploit the associativity and
commutativity of reduction computations. We have implemented a
reduction-enabled scheduling approach in the Polly polyhedral optimizer and
evaluate it on the standard Polybench 3.2 benchmark suite. We were able to
detect and model all 52 arithmetic reductions and achieve speedups up to
2.21 on a quad core machine by exploiting the multidimensional
reduction in the BiCG benchmark.Comment: Presented at the IMPACT15 worksho
A Comparative Analysis of STM Approaches to Reduction Operations in Irregular Applications
As a recently consolidated paradigm for optimistic concurrency in modern multicore architectures, Transactional Memory (TM)
can help to the exploitation of parallelism in irregular applications when data dependence information is not available up to run-
time. This paper presents and discusses how to leverage TM to exploit parallelism in an important class of irregular applications, the class that exhibits irregular reduction patterns. In order to test and compare our techniques with other solutions, they were implemented in a software TM system called ReduxSTM, that acts as a proof of concept. Basically, ReduxSTM combines two major ideas: a sequential-equivalent ordering of transaction commits that assures the correct result, and an extension of the underlying TM privatization mechanism to reduce unnecessary overhead due to reduction memory updates as well as unnecesary aborts and rollbacks. A comparative study of STM solutions, including ReduxSTM, and other more classical approaches to the parallelization of reduction operations is presented in terms of time, memory and overhead.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech
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