A portable parallel programs library for simulation and optimization in multiprocessor systems

Thesis/Dissertation · Sun Jan 01 04:00:00 EST 1989

OSTI ID:6037536

Lyu, JrJung

The availability of more and more cost-effective and powerful parallel computers has enhanced the ability of the operations research community to solve more laborious computational problems. Most of the research on numerical algorithms using parallel computing is related to systems of linear equations, partial differential equations, the fast Fourier transform, and linear algebra such as matrix multiplication. Only rarely have parallelization efforts been aimed at those techniques in which operations researchers are interested: algorithms for mathematical programming, integer programming, dynamic programming, and simulation runs dispatcher. This dissertation develops a framework for the design and implementation of a transportable operations research library in C for use on several shared memory multiprocessor systems, such as Encore Multimax, Alliant FX/8 and Sequent Balance machines. A non-gradient unconstrained nonlinear optimization algorithm and a simulation runs dispatcher are parallelized to serve as examples of the feasibility of this framework. The analysis of the covariance has detected the importance of the system load factor, which has been ignored in most of the other research. Nearly linear speedup for the parallel runs dispatcher suggests that the library, if used properly, can reduce the execution time of a program in almost n times if n processors are available. The existence of a portable parallel operations research library can relieve most of the operations researchers from doing parallel programming, and can serve as a benchmark for the performance evaluation of multiprocessor systems.

• Research Organization: Iowa Univ., Iowa City, IA (USA)
• OSTI ID: 6037536
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200* -- Mathematics & Computers
ALGEBRA
ALGORITHMS
ARRAY PROCESSORS
COMPUTER CALCULATIONS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DESIGN
DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING
EQUATIONS
FOURIER ANALYSIS
LINEAR PROGRAMMING
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC
MATHEMATICS
MATRIX ELEMENTS
NONLINEAR PROGRAMMING
NUMERICAL SOLUTION
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
OPTIMIZATION
PARALLEL PROCESSING
PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
PERFORMANCE TESTING
PROGRAMMING
SIMULATION
TESTING