11,966 research outputs found
Defragmenting the Module Layout of a Partially Reconfigurable Device
Modern generations of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) allow for
partial reconfiguration. In an online context, where the sequence of modules to
be loaded on the FPGA is unknown beforehand, repeated insertion and deletion of
modules leads to progressive fragmentation of the available space, making
defragmentation an important issue. We address this problem by propose an
online and an offline component for the defragmentation of the available space.
We consider defragmenting the module layout on a reconfigurable device. This
corresponds to solving a two-dimensional strip packing problem. Problems of
this type are NP-hard in the strong sense, and previous algorithmic results are
rather limited. Based on a graph-theoretic characterization of feasible
packings, we develop a method that can solve two-dimensional defragmentation
instances of practical size to optimality. Our approach is validated for a set
of benchmark instances.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, 1 table, Latex, to appear in "Engineering of
Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms" as a "Distinguished Paper
A test problem for visual investigation of high-dimensional multi-objective search
An inherent problem in multiobjective optimization is that the visual observation of solution vectors with four or more objectives is infeasible, which brings major difficulties for algorithmic design, examination, and development. This paper presents a test problem, called the Rectangle problem, to aid the visual investigation of high-dimensional multiobjective search. Key features of the Rectangle problem are that the Pareto optimal solutions 1) lie in a rectangle in the two-variable decision space and 2) are similar (in the sense of Euclidean geometry) to their images in the four-dimensional objective space. In this case, it is easy to examine the behavior of objective vectors in terms of both convergence and diversity, by observing their proximity to the optimal rectangle and their distribution in the rectangle, respectively, in the decision space. Fifteen algorithms are investigated. Underperformance of Pareto-based algorithms as well as most state-of-the-art many-objective algorithms indicates that the proposed problem not only is a good tool to help visually understand the behavior of multiobjective search in a high-dimensional objective space but also can be used as a challenging benchmark function to test algorithms' ability in balancing the convergence and diversity of solutions
RRR: Rank-Regret Representative
Selecting the best items in a dataset is a common task in data exploration.
However, the concept of "best" lies in the eyes of the beholder: different
users may consider different attributes more important, and hence arrive at
different rankings. Nevertheless, one can remove "dominated" items and create a
"representative" subset of the data set, comprising the "best items" in it. A
Pareto-optimal representative is guaranteed to contain the best item of each
possible ranking, but it can be almost as big as the full data. Representative
can be found if we relax the requirement to include the best item for every
possible user, and instead just limit the users' "regret". Existing work
defines regret as the loss in score by limiting consideration to the
representative instead of the full data set, for any chosen ranking function.
However, the score is often not a meaningful number and users may not
understand its absolute value. Sometimes small ranges in score can include
large fractions of the data set. In contrast, users do understand the notion of
rank ordering. Therefore, alternatively, we consider the position of the items
in the ranked list for defining the regret and propose the {\em rank-regret
representative} as the minimal subset of the data containing at least one of
the top- of any possible ranking function. This problem is NP-complete. We
use the geometric interpretation of items to bound their ranks on ranges of
functions and to utilize combinatorial geometry notions for developing
effective and efficient approximation algorithms for the problem. Experiments
on real datasets demonstrate that we can efficiently find small subsets with
small rank-regrets
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