In mobile edge computing systems, the edge server placement problem is mainly tackled as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved with mixed integer programming, heuristic or meta-heuristic algorithms, etc. These methods, however, have profound defect implications such as poor scalability, local optimal solutions, and parameter tuning difficulties. To overcome these defects, we propose a novel edge server placement algorithm based on deep q-network and reinforcement learning, dubbed DQN-ESPA, which can achieve optimal placements without relying on previous placement experience. In DQN-ESPA, the edge server placement problem is modeled as a Markov decision process, which is formalized with the state space, action space and reward function, and it is subsequently solved using a reinforcement learning algorithm. Experimental results using real datasets from Shanghai Telecom show that DQN-ESPA outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms such as simulated annealing placement algorithm (SAPA), Top-K placement algorithm (TKPA), K-Means placement algorithm (KMPA), and random placement algorithm (RPA). In particular, with a comprehensive consideration of access delay and workload balance, DQN-ESPA achieves up to 13.40% and 15.54% better placement performance for 100 and 300 edge servers respectively.

Space exploration is a hot topic in the application field of mobile robots. Proposed solutions have included the frontier exploration algorithm, heuristic algorithms, and deep reinforcement learning. However, these methods cannot solve space exploration in time in a dynamic environment. This paper models the space exploration problem of mobile robots based on the decision-making process of the cognitive architecture of Soar, and three space exploration heuristic algorithms (HAs) are further proposed based on the model to improve the exploration speed of the robot. Experiments are carried out based on the Easter environment, and the results show that HAs have improved the exploration speed of the Easter robot at least 2.04 times of the original algorithm in Easter, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed robot space exploration strategy and the corresponding HAs.

Full detector simulation was among the largest CPU consumers in all CERN experiment software stacks for the first two runs of the Large Hadron Collider. In the early 2010s, it was projected that simulation demands would scale linearly with increasing luminosity, with only partial compensation from increasing computing resources. The extension of fast simulation approaches to cover more use cases that represent a larger fraction of the simulation budget is only part of the solution, because of intrinsic precision limitations. The remainder corresponds to speeding up the simulation software by several factors, which is not achievable by just applying simple optimizations to the current code base. In this context, the GeantV R&D project was launched, aiming to redesign the legacy particle transport code in order to benefit from features of fine-grained parallelism, including vectorization and increased locality of both instruction and data. This paper provides an extensive presentation of the results and achievements of this R&D project, as well as the conclusions and lessons learned from the beta version prototype.

The SIMT execution model is commonly used for general GPU development. CUDA and OpenCL developers write scalar code that is implicitly parallelized by compiler and hardware. On Intel GPUs, however, this abstraction has profound performance implications as the underlying ISA is SIMD and important hardware capabilities cannot be fully utilized. To close this performance gap we introduce C- For- Metal (CM), an explicit SIMD programming framework designed to deliver close-to-the-metal performance on Intel GPUs. The CM programming language and its vector/matrix types provide an intuitive interface to exploit the underlying hardware features, allowing fine-grained register management, SIMD size control and cross-lane data sharing. Experimental results show that CM applications from different domains outperform the best-known SIMT-based OpenCL implementations, achieving up to 2.7x speedup on the latest Intel GPU.

One of the most important steps in obtaining a relational model from legacy systems is the extraction of functional dependencies (FDs) through data mining techniques. Several methods have been proposed for this purpose and most use direct search methods that traverse the search space in exponential time in the number of attributes of the relation. As it is not uncommon to find in practice relations with tens of attributes, a need exists to further develop more efficient techniques to find FDs. The method studied here finds the minimal set of minimal FDs using algorithms that solve the hypergraph duality problem applied on the complement of the refutation hypergraph of the relation without going through the exponential search space. After showing that the extraction of FDs can be reduced to the hypergraph duality problem, experimental results are given as verification and characterization of the correctness and time complexity of the proposed tool.