Optimising Memory Management for Belief Propagation in Junction Trees using GPGPUs

Belief Propagation (BP) in Junction Trees (JT) is one of the most popular approaches to compute posteriors in Bayesian Networks (BN). Such approach has significant computational requirements that can be addressed by using highly parallel architectures (i.e., General Purpose Graphic Processing Units) to parallelise the message update phases of BP. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to parallelise BP with GPGPUs, which focuses on optimising the memory layout of the BN tables so to achieve better performance in terms of increased speedup, reduced data transfers between the host and the GPGPU, and scalability. Our empirical comparison with the state of the art approach on standard datasets confirms significant improvements in speedups (up to +594%), and scalability (as our method can operate on networks whose potential tables exceed the global memory of the GPGPU)

Constraint Optimisation Techniques for Real-World Applications

Constraint optimisation represents a fundamental technique that has been successfully employed in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in order to face a number of multi-agent coordination challenges. In this thesis we focus on Coalition Formation (CF), one of the key approaches for coordination in MAS. CF aims at the formation of groups that maximise a particular objective functions (e.g., arrange shared rides among multiple agents in order to minimise travel costs). Specifically, we discuss a special case of CF known as Graph-Constrained CF (GCCF) where a network connecting the agents constrains the formation of coalitions. We focus on this type of problem given that in many real-world applications, agents may be connected by a communication network or only trust certain peers in their social network. In particular, the contributions of this thesis are the following. We propose a novel representation of this problem and we design an efficient solution algorithm, i.e., CFSS. We evaluate CFSS on GCCF scenarios like collective energy purchasing and social ridesharing using realistic data (i.e., energy consumption profiles from households in the UK, GeoLife for spatial data, and Twitter as social network). Results show that CFSS outperforms state of the art GCCF approaches both in terms of runtime and scalability. CFSS is the first algorithm that provides solutions with good quality guarantees for large-scale GCCF instances with thousands of agents (i.e., more that 2700). In addition, we address the problem of computing the transfer or payment to each agent to ensure it is fairly rewarded for its contribution to its coalition. This aspect of CF, denoted as payment computation, is of utmost importance in scenario characterised by agents with rational behaviours, such as collective energy purchasing and social ridesharing. In this perspective, we propose PK, the first method to compute payments in large-scale GCCF scenarios that are also stable in a game-theoretic sense. Finally, we provide an alternative method for the solution of GCCF, by exploiting the close relation between such problem and Constraint Optimisation Problems (COPs). We consider Bucket Elimination (BE), one of the most important algorithmic frameworks to solve COPs, and we propose CUBE, a highly-parallel GPU implementation of the most computationally intensive operations of BE. CUBE adopts an efficient memory layout that results in a high computational throughput. In addition, CUBE is not limited by the amount of memory of the GPU and, hence, it can cope with problems of realistic nature. CUBE has been tested on the SPOT5 dataset, which contains several satellite management problems modelled as COPs. Moreover, we use CUBE to solve COP-GCCF, the first COP formalisation of GCCF that results in a linear number of constraints with respect to the number of agents. This property is crucial to ensure the scalability of our approach. Results show that COP-GCCF produces significant improvements with respect to state of the art algorithms when applied to a realistic graph topology (i.e., Twitter), both in terms of runtime and memory. Overall, this thesis provides a novel perspective on important techniques in the context of MAS (such as CF and constraint optimisation), allowing to solve realistic problems involving thousands of agents for the first time

High-Performance and Power-Aware Graph Processing on GPUs

Graphs are a common representation in many problem domains, including engineering, finance, medicine, and scientific applications. Different problems map to very large graphs, often involving millions of vertices. Even though very efficient sequential implementations of graph algorithms exist, they become impractical when applied on such actual very large graphs. On the other hand, graphics processing units (GPUs) have become widespread architectures as they provide massive parallelism at low cost. Parallel execution on GPUs may achieve speedup up to three orders of magnitude with respect to the sequential counterparts. Nevertheless, accelerating efficient and optimized sequential algorithms and porting (i.e., parallelizing) their implementation to such many-core architectures is a very challenging task. The task is made even harder since energy and power consumption are becoming constraints in addition, or in same case as an alternative, to performance. This work aims at developing a platform that provides (I) a library of parallel, efficient, and tunable implementations of the most important graph algorithms for GPUs, and (II) an advanced profiling model to analyze both performance and power consumption of the algorithm implementations. The platform goal is twofold. Through the library, it aims at saving developing effort in the parallelization task through a primitive-based approach. Through the profiling framework, it aims at customizing such primitives by considering both the architectural details and the target efficiency metrics (i.e., performance or power)

Handbook of Vascular Biometrics

This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art in and availability of commercial systems and open datasets/open source software, individual chapters focus on specific aspects of one of the biometric modalities, including questions of usability, security, and privacy. The book features contributions from both academia and major industrial manufacturers