Mathematics of High Performance Computing
Parallel Computational Mechanics

This informal workshop will cover a wide spectrum of topics related to algorithms and applications in parallel processing of discrete optimization and related problems.

Discrete optimization problems arise in various applications, such as airline crew scheduling, corporate planning, computer-aided design and manufacturing, communications network design, machine vision, database query design, cellular telephone frequency assignment, and constraint directed reasoning. Often, a discrete optimization problem is formulated in terms of finding a least-cost solution path in a graph from an initial node to a goal node and solved by graph/tree search methods such as branch-and-bound and dynamic programming.

The search for solutions in a combinatorially large problem space is a major problem in computer science, engineering, and operations research. A general class of difficult and very important combinatorial problems include integer programming with linear or nonlinear objective function. In the worst case, such problems require solution time that grows exponentially as a function of their input size. Consequently, parallel systems, possibly with hundreds or thousands of processors, give us the perspective of efficiently solving relatively large instances of hard problems, being a motivation for using parallel processing.

1996-1997 Mathematics in High Performance Computing

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