OPTIMIZATION OVER THE INTERNET

Dr. Jeff Linderoth
Argonne National Laboratory
and Dash Optimization


The Internet can be thought of as a "metacomputer" -- a large
collection of loosely coupled, heterogeneous, non-dedicated computing
resources. Because of the potential power and low cost of this type
of environment, users of optimization technology have the potential to
solve problems of larger scale and complexity than ever before.

To utilize metacomputers effectively, a number of implementation
issues must be addressed. We have developed an abstract software
framework that hides the difficult implementation issues from the
user. This framework is used to create a parallel implementation of a
state-of-the-art algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP).
Using this implementation, we report on the solution of QAP instances
that had remained unsolved for decades.