Search

Branch-and-bound approaches are promising in pruning fruitless search space during the resource constrained scheduling. However, such approaches only compare the estimated upper and lower bounds of an incomplete schedule to the length of the best feasible schedule at that iteration, which does not fully exploit the potential of the pruning during the search. Aiming to improve the performance of resource constrained scheduling, this paper proposes a parallel structure-aware pruning approach that can traverse the search space significantly faster than state-of-the-art branch-and-bound techniques. This paper makes three major contributions: i) it proposes an efficient pruning technique using the structural scheduling information of the obtained best feasible schedules; ii) it investigates how to perform parallel search to enable efficient multi-directional search and generation of effective fences by tuning the operation enumeration order; and iii) it presents a framework that supports the sharing of minimum upper-bound and fence information among different search tasks to enable efficient parallel structure-aware pruning. The experimental results demonstrate that our parallel pruning approach can drastically reduce the overall resource constrained scheduling time under a wide variety of resource constraints.

N-gram models are the most widely used language models in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Since the size of the model grows rapidly with respect to the model order and available training data, many methods have been proposed for pruning the least relevant -grams from the model. However, correct smoothing of the N-gram probability distributions is important and performance may degrade significantly if pruning conflicts with smoothing. In this paper, we show that some of the commonly used pruning methods do not take into account how removing an -gram should modify the backoff distributions in the state-of-the-art Kneser-Ney smoothing. To solve this problem, we present two new algorithms: one for pruning Kneser-Ney smoothed models, and one for growing them incrementally. Experiments on Finnish and English text corpora show that the proposed pruning algorithm provides considerable improvements over previous pruning algorithms on Kneser-Ney smoothed models and is also better than the baseline entropy pruned Good-Turing smoothed models. The models created by the growing algorithm provide a good starting point for our pruning algorithm, leading to further improvements. The improvements in the Finnish speech recognition over the other Kneser-Ney smoothed models are statistically significant, as well.

For many applications of the A* algorithm, the state space is a graph rather than a tree. The implication of this for parallel A* algorithms is that different processors may perform significant duplicated work if interprocessor duplicates are not pruned. In this paper, we consider the problem of duplicate pruning in parallel A* graph-search algorithms implemented on distributed-memory machines. A commonly used method for duplicate pruning uses a hash function to associate with each distinct node of the search space a particular processor to which duplicate nodes arising in different processors are transmitted and thereby pruned. This approach has two major drawbacks. First, load balance is determined solely by the hash function. Second, node transmissions for duplicate pruning are global; this can lead to hot spots and slower message delivery. To overcome these problems, we propose two different duplicate pruning strategies: 1) To achieve good load balance, we decouple the task of duplicate pruning from load balancing, by using a hash function for the former and a load balancing scheme for the latter. 2) A novel search-space partitioning scheme that allocates disjoint parts of the search space to disjoint subcubes in a hypercube (or disjoint processor groups in the target architecture), so that duplicate pruning is achieved with only intrasubcube or adjacent intersubcube communication. Thus message latency and hot-spot probability are greatly reduced. The above duplicate pruning schemes were implemented on an nCUBE2 hypercube multicomputer to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). For uniformly distributed intercity costs, our strategies yield a speedup improvement of 13 to 35 percent on 1,024-processors over previous methods that do not prune any duplicates, and 13 to 25 percent over the previous hashing-only scheme. For normally distributed data the corresponding figures are 135 percent and 10 to 155 percent. Finally, we analyze the scalability of our parallel A* algorithms on k-ary n-cube networks in terms of the isoefficiency metric, and show that they have isoefficiency lower and upper bounds of /spl Theta/(P log P) and /spl Theta/(Pkn/sup 2/), respectively.