[SwarmFest2004] sf04 abstract submission

[Matteo Morini]

Please consider inlined abstract for the sf04.

Thank you, Matteo Morini

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Penelope meets Nemote: distributed production planning optimization

The original textile-oriented production planner Penelope is an
extremely timeconsuming process, very heavy from a computational
standpoint.  Running the system as a monolythic task, on a single CPU,
brings unsustainably long completion times, especially when employed
in production environments where the size of the planning problem
exceeds the naiveté of unsophisticated situations tailored for testing
needs only.

In order to overcome prompt response constraints, the inherently
parallel work of evaluating multiple candidate plans has been
distributed among multiple CPUs, residing on networked pcs.

The tasks distribution, load balancing and failure tolerance
management is performed by an infrastructure developed by the Nemote*
group: Riccardo Boero, Gianluigi Ferraris, Matteo Morini and Michele
Sonnessa.  The original, swarm-based, objective-C model has been split
into self-contained components glued together by java
processes. Different nodes comminicate via RMI and the java and
objective C parts communicate via tcp sockets.
 
Performance scales almost linearly, thanks to the careful trimming of
the system, which allows tasks to be distributed in batch in order to
minimize network overhead.

Nemote has not been developed as an ad-hoc tool, being easy to exploit
whenever distributed computational needs arise, when parallel
modelization is the fundamental issue, when remote interaction among
cooperative distributed processing leads to more plausible
simulations.

(*) NEtworked MOdelling TEam, supported by the Liases Computer Lab of
the Faculty of Economics, University of Turin




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