[Colloquium] Lou/Dissertation Defense/Oct 3, 2016

[Margaret Jaffey via Colloquium]

       Department of Computer Science/The University of Chicago

                     *** Dissertation Defense ***


Candidate:  Zhihao Lou

Date:  Monday, October 3, 2016

Time:  10:00 AM

Place:  Ryerson 277

Title: A Massively Scalable Parallel Simulated Annealing Algorithm

Abstract:
Simulated annealing algorithm is a powerful general purpose stochastic
optimization algorithm that relies only on the value of the cost
function being optimized. However, existing parallelizations of the
simulated annealing algorithm all provide limited speedup. This
dissertation presents a parallel simulated annealing algorithm using
an adaptive resampling interval. The algorithm gives a speedup of 170
using 192 processor cores when applied to a 5000-dimension Rastrigin
function. It also achieves a speedup of more than 40 using 128 cores
on two systems biology problems. In addition, this dissertation
proposes an algorithm to study the structure of the search space based
on the density of states. The results provide information on setting
the parameters of the annealing algorithm for the problem being
optimized.

Zhihao's advisors are Prof. Rick Stevens and Prof. John Reinitz

Login to the Computer Science Department website for details,
including a draft copy of the dissertation:

 https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/phd/phd_announcements#zhlou

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Margaret P. Jaffey            margaret at cs.uchicago.edu
Department of Computer Science
Student Support Rep (Ry 156)               (773) 702-6011
The University of Chicago      http://www.cs.uchicago.edu
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