6 research outputs found
Performance Modeling and Analysis of a Massively Parallel DIRECTā Part 1
Modeling and analysis techniques are used to investigate
the performance of a massively parallel version
of DIRECT, a global search algorithm widely used
in multidisciplinary design optimization applications.
Several highdimensional
benchmark functions and
real world problems are used to test the design effectiveness
under various problem structures. Theoretical
and experimental results are compared for two
parallel clusters with different system scale and network
connectivity. The present work aims at studying
the performance sensitivity to important parameters
for problem configurations, parallel schemes,
and system settings. The performance metrics
include the memory usage, load balancing, parallel
efficiency, and scalability. An analytical bounding
model is constructed to measure the load balancing
performance under different schemes. Additionally,
linear regression models are used to characterize
two major overhead sourcesāinterprocessor communication
and processor idleness, and also applied
to the isoefficiency functions in scalability analysis.
For a variety of highdimensional
problems and large
scale systems, the massively parallel design has
achieved reasonable performance. The results of
the performance study provide guidance for efficient
problem and scheme configuration. More importantly,
the generalized design considerations and
analysis techniques are beneficial for transforming
many global search algorithms to become effective
large scale parallel optimization tools
Adjusting process count on demand for petascale global optimizationā
There are many challenges that need to be met before efficient and reliable computation at the
petascale is possible. Many scientific and engineering codes running at the petascale are likely to
be memory intensive, which makes thrashing a serious problem for many petascale applications.
One way to overcome this challenge is to use a dynamic number of processes, so that the total
amount of memory available for the computation can be increased on demand. This paper
describes modifications made to the massively parallel global optimization code pVTdirect in
order to allow for a dynamic number of processes. In particular, the modified version of the
code monitors memory use and spawns new processes if the amount of available memory is
determined to be insufficient. The primary design challenges are discussed, and performance
results are presented and analyzed
Power Saving Experiments for Large Scale Global Optimization
Green computing, an emerging ļ¬eld of research that seeks to reduce excess power consumption in high performance computing (HPC), is gaining popularity among researchers. Research in this ļ¬eld often relies on simulation or only uses a small cluster, typically 8 or 16 nodes, because of the lack of hardware support. In contrast, System G at Virginia Tech is a 2592 processor supercomputer equipped with power aware components suitable for large scale green computing research. DIRECT is a deterministic global optimization algorithm, implemented in the mathematical software package VTDIRECT95. This paper explores the potential energy savings for the parallel implementation of DIRECT, called pVTdirect, when used with a large scale computational biology application, parameter estimation for a budding yeast cell cycle model, on System G. Two power aware approaches for pVTdirect are developed and compared against the CPUSPEED power saving system tool. The results show that knowledge of the parallel workload of the underlying application is beneficial for power management
Global Continuous Optimization with Error Bound and Fast Convergence
This paper considers global optimization with a black-box unknown objective
function that can be non-convex and non-differentiable. Such a difficult
optimization problem arises in many real-world applications, such as parameter
tuning in machine learning, engineering design problem, and planning with a
complex physics simulator. This paper proposes a new global optimization
algorithm, called Locally Oriented Global Optimization (LOGO), to aim for both
fast convergence in practice and finite-time error bound in theory. The
advantage and usage of the new algorithm are illustrated via theoretical
analysis and an experiment conducted with 11 benchmark test functions. Further,
we modify the LOGO algorithm to specifically solve a planning problem via
policy search with continuous state/action space and long time horizon while
maintaining its finite-time error bound. We apply the proposed planning method
to accident management of a nuclear power plant. The result of the application
study demonstrates the practical utility of our method