ColloquiaAlberto Maria Segre - talk on Friday, February 8

[Margery Ishmael]

	      Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                 1100 E. 58th Street, Ryerson Hall

                        Colloquium Announcement

Friday, February 8 at 2:30 p.m. in Ryerson 251

Title: Nagging: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Paradigm for Distributed Search

Speaker: ALBERTO MARIA SEGRE, University of Iowa

Professor and Tippie Research Fellow
Department of Management Sciences
Department of Computer Science

Abstract: This talk describes nagging, a technique for parallelizing
search in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment.  Nagging
exploits the speedup anomaly often observed when parallelizing problems by
playing multiple reformulations of the problem or portions of the problem
against each other.  Nagging is intrinsically fault tolerant and robust to
relatively long message latencies.  In this talk, we show how nagging can
be used to parallelize several different algorithms drawn from the
artificial intelligence literature, and describe how nagging can be
combined with partitioning, the more traditional search parallelization
strategy.  We present a theoretical analysis of the advantage of nagging
with respect to partitioning, and give empirical results obtained on a
cluster of 64 processors that demonstrate nagging's effectiveness and
scalability as applied to A* search, $alpha beta$ minimax game tree
search, and the Davis-Putnam algorithm.

http://dollar.biz.uiowa.edu/~segre/

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*
Persons with disabilities who may need assistance, please call 773.834.8977


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Margery Ishmael
Secretary to the Chairman, Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
tel. 773.834.8977  fax. 773.702.8487