Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: heirich@caltech.edu (Alan Heirich)
Subject: Re: Workload management for functional languages?
Organization: Caltech CRPC
Date: 21 Sep 1995 18:03:04 GMT
Message-ID: <43s9co$qra@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>

In article <43mmig$9v0@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>, ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de (Claus Assmann) writes:
... [deleted] ...
|> on functional program specifications.  In this context we would like to
|> investigate ways and means of applying chaos management/control methods
|> as they are known from physics to dynamic load balancing and scheduling
...
|> At the same time, we would also like to know whether there is any work
|> going on in applying neural networks to dynamic load balancing and
|> whether anyone has come up with an implementation/simulation that shows
|> satisfactory results.
...
|> Claus Assmann


   I don't believe anyone has published on the idea of using chaotic
systems to control computing processes.  It's a novel idea.  In
contrast, neural network and other physically based models have been
used for load balancing (see for example "Physical Computation", G.
Fox, Concurrency, v3 (6), 627--653, 1991).  Neural network approaches
tend not to scale well, for the same reason that neural networks
generally don't work on parallel computers: they require all-to-all
communication at every step.

   On the other hand, the use of diffusion models in load balancing
has a long and honorable history going back at least as far as
Dijkstra & Scholten (1979).  For some successful papers see Cybenko
(JPDC 1989) or my own paper in the proceedings of the International
Conference on Parallel Processing (1995). 


:::::[ ALAN HEIRICH, URL http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~heirich/heirich.html ]:::::
:::     Computational Scientist, Center for Advanced Computing Research     :::
:::       Ph.D. candidate, Caltech Department of Computer Science and       :::
:::               Center for Research on Parallel Computation               :::
::[ heirich@caltech.edu  (818) 395-4600, 256-80 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125 ]::

