Date of Award

12-1991

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Gary B. Lamont, PhD

Abstract

The objective of this investigation is to design, analyze, and validate the generation of optimal schedules for simulation systems. Improved performance in simulation execution times can greatly improve the return rate of information provided by such simulations resulting in reduced development costs of future computer/electronic systems. Optimal schedule generation of precedence-constrained task systems including iterative feedback systems such as VHDL or war gaming simulations for execution on a parallel computer is known to be N P-hard. Efficiently parallelizing such problems takes full advantage of present computer technology to achieve a significant reduction in the search times required. Unfortunately, the extreme combinatoric 'explosion' of possible task assignments to processors creates an exponential search space prohibitive on any computer for search algorithms which maintain more than one branch of the search graph at any one time. This work develops various parallel modified backtracking (MBT) search algorithms for execution on an iPSC/2 hypercube that bound the space requirements and produce an optimally minimum schedule with linear speed-up. The parallel MBT search algorithm is validated using various feedback task simulation systems which are scheduled for execution on an iPSC/2 hypercube. The search time, size of the enumerated search space, and communications overhead required to ensure efficient utilization during the parallel search process are analyzed. The various applications indicated appreciable improvement in performance using this method.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-GCS-ENG-91D-14

DTIC Accession Number

ADA243721

Comments

The author's Vita page is omitted.

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