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Parampl: A Simple Approach for Parallel Execution of AMPL Programs

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Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (PPAM 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8385))

Abstract

Due to the physical processor frequency scaling constraint, current computer systems are equipped with more and more processing units. Therefore, parallel computing has become an important paradigm in the recent years. AMPL is a comprehensive algebraic modeling language for formulating optimization problems. However, AMPL itself does not support defining tasks to be executed in parallel. Although in last years the parallelism is often provided by solvers, which take advantage of multiple processing units, in many cases it is more efficient to formulate the problem in a decomposed way and apply various problem specific enhancements. Moreover, when the number of cores is permanently growing, it is possible to use both types of parallelism.

This paper presents the design of Parampl - a simple tool for parallel execution of AMPL programs. Parampl introduces explicit asynchronous execution of AMPL subproblems from within the program code. Such an extension implies a new view on AMPL programs, where a programmer is able to define complex, parallelized optimization tasks and formulate algorithms solving optimization subproblems in parallel.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The time of calculations of the AMPL mathematical instructions in the sequential part, i.e. the time of execution of the coordination algorithm is rather negligible. However, for much smaller problems and large numbers of subproblems and iterations, we noticed that significant portion of the execution time is the startup time of the Python virtual machine and thus the speedup drops sharply.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Artur Olszak

  2. Institute of Control and Computation Engineering, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

    Andrzej Karbowski

  3. NASK, Research and Academic Computer Network, Warsaw, Poland

    Andrzej Karbowski

Authors
  1. Artur Olszak
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  2. Andrzej Karbowski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Artur Olszak .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer and Information Science, Czestochowa University of Technology, Czestochowa, Poland

    Roman Wyrzykowski

  2. University of Tennessee, Department of Computer Science, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Jack Dongarra

  3. Institute of Computer and Information Science, Czestochowa University of Technology, Czestochowa, Poland

    Konrad Karczewski

  4. Technical University of Denmark Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Jerzy Waśniewski

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Olszak, A., Karbowski, A. (2014). Parampl: A Simple Approach for Parallel Execution of AMPL Programs. In: Wyrzykowski, R., Dongarra, J., Karczewski, K., Waśniewski, J. (eds) Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. PPAM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8385. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55195-6_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55195-6_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-55194-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-55195-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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