*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
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.
In the first portion of this talk, we will introduce existing software tools that allow users to harness the computational power of the internet. The second portion of the talk will deal with optimization algorithms that have been adapted to metacomputing platforms by using these software tools. As one concrete example, we will describe an implementation of a state-of-the-art algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). Using this implementation, and the computational power of the internet, we are able to report the solutions of QAP instances that had been unsolved for decades.
