31.05.2010

Informatik-Kolloquium

Im Sommersemester 2010 findet im Rahmen des Informatik-Kolloquiums der folgende Vortrag statt:

Montag, 31. Mai 2010, 17:00 Uhr, Turing-Hörsaal

Prof. Dr. Salvador Abreu (Universidade de Évora, Portugal)

Parallel Constraint Execution: The Cell/BE and Beyond

High levels of abstraction in expressing algorithms can be viewed as a consequence of using declarative programming paradigms. It also means the programmer relinquishes detailed control and thereby allows the system to pick and choose a good execution strategy, in particular a parallel one.

In the domain of combinatorial search and optimization, most of the attempts to take advantage of parallelism have targeted homogeneous shared memory systems. This is the case in the areas of Constraint Solvers, SAT solvers or Model-checking. The different processors work on shared data-structures representing a global environment in which the subcomputations take place. This approach cannot be used on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE), because heavy use of shared memory degrades the overall performance. To use the Cell processor for combinatorial optimization and constraint-based problem solving, new approaches have to be investigated, in particular those that can lead to independent subcomputations requiring little or no communication between processors and limited or even no accesses to the main memory.