A Parallel Primal-Dual Interior-Point Method for Semidefinite Programs Using Positive Definite Matrix Completion

A parallel computational method SDPARA-C is presented for SDPs (semidefinite programs). It combines two methods SDPARA and SDPA-C proposed by the authors who developed a software package SDPA. SDPARA is a parallel implementation of SDPA and it features parallel computation of the elements of the Schur complement equation system and a parallel Cholesky factorization of … Read more

Parallel Strategies for GRASP with path-relinking

A Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) is a metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization. It usually consists of a construction procedure based on a greedy randomized algorithm and local search. Path-relinking is an intensification strategy that explores trajectories that connect high quality solutions. We analyze two parallel strategies for GRASP with path-relinking and propose a criterion … Read more

A Grid-Enabled Distributed Branch-and-Bound Algorithm with

This work introduces a distributed branch-and-bound algorithm to be run on computational Grids. Grids are often organized in a hierarchical fashion: clusters of processors connected via high-speed links, while the clusters themselves are geographically distant and connected through slower links. Our algorithm does not employ the usual master-worker paradigm and it considers the hierarchical structure … Read more

Parallel Interior Point Solver for Structured Quadratic Programs: Application to Financial Planning Problems

Issues of implementation of a library for parallel interior-point methods for quadratic programming are addressed. The solver can easily exploit any special structure of the underlying optimization problem. In particular, it allows a nested embedding of structures and by this means very complicated real-life optimization problems can be modeled. The efficiency of the solver is … Read more

A methodology for the analysis of parallel GRASP strategies

In this paper, we describe a methodology for the analysis of greedy randomized adaptive search procedures (GRASP). GRASP is a metaheuristic for combinatorial optimization. It usually consists of a construction procedure based on a greedy randomized algorithm and a local search. Hybrid approaches of GRASP with path-relinking developed for the 3-index assignment problem (AP3) and … Read more

Parallel Interval Continuous Global Optimization Algorithms

We theorically study, on a distributed memory architecture, the parallelization of Hansen’s algorithm for the continuous global optimization with inequality constraints, using interval arithmetic. We propose a parallel algorithm based on a dynamic redistribution of the working list among the processors. On the other hand, we exploit the reduction technique, developped by Hansen, for computing … Read more

Parallel Computing on Semidefinite Programs

This paper demonstrates how interior-point methods can use multiple processors efficiently to solve large semidefinite programs that arise in VLSI design, control theory, and graph coloring. Previous implementations of these methods have been restricted to a single processor. By computing and solving the Schur complement matrix in parallel, multiple processors enable the faster solution of … Read more

Large-Scale Linear Programming Techniques for the Design of Protein Folding Potentials

We present large-scale optimization techniques to model the energy function that underlies the folding process of proteins. Linear Programming is used to identify parameters in the energy function model, the objective being that the model predict the structure of known proteins correctly. Such trained functions can then be used either for {\em ab-initio} prediction or … Read more

NLPQLP: A New Fortran Implementation of a Sequential Quadratic Programming Algorithm

The Fortran subroutine NLPQLP solves smooth nonlinear programming problems and is an extension of the code NLPQL. The new version is specifically tuned to run under distributed systems. A new input parameter l is introduced for the number of parallel machines, that is the number of function calls to be executed simultaneously. In case of … Read more

Pivot, Cut, and Dive: A Heuristic for 0-1 Mixed Integer Programming

We present a heuristic method for general 0-1 mixed integer programming, intended for eventual incorporation into parallel branch-and-bound methods for solving such problems exactly. The core of the heuristic is a rounding method based on simplex pivots, employing only gradient information, for a strictly concave, differentiable merit function measuring integer feasibility. When local minima of … Read more