Parallel framework for cooperative processes

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Craus, Mitică | Rudeanu, Laurenţiu

Affiliations: Department of Computer Engineering, Technical University "Gh.Asachi", 700050 Iaşi, Romania. E-mail: craus@cs.tuiasi.ro, lrudeanu@yahoo.com

Abstract: This paper describes the work of an object oriented framework designed to be used in the parallelization of a set of related algorithms. The idea behind the system we are describing is to have a re-usable framework for running several sequential algorithms in a parallel environment. The algorithms that the framework can be used with have several things in common: they have to run in cycles and the work should be possible to be split between several "processing units". The parallel framework uses the message-passing communication paradigm and is organized as a master-slave system. Two applications are presented: an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) parallel algorithm for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and an Image Processing (IP) parallel algorithm for the Symmetrical Neighborhood Filter (SNF). The implementations of these applications by means of the parallel framework prove to have good performances: approximatively linear speedup and low communication cost.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 205-217, 2005