Engineering Commons^™

Optimization In The Simulation Of Jammed Polyhedral Particles, Joseph W. Mynhier, Ishan Srivastava, Timothy S. Fisher

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Energy loss due to poor transport properties in electrically and thermally conducting materials, such as battery electrodes and thermoelectric composites, contributes to the energy inefficiency of electronic devices. For conductive materials composed of granular materials, particle-particle contact topology strongly governs the efficiency of energy transfer. Although there is a large body of existing work on the arrangements made by granular materials comprised of spherical particles, less is known about the mechanically stable arrangements of granular materials made of convex polyhedra. This project seeks to create a computer simulation of the solidification of convex polyhedra from a diffuse state into a …

Automatically Optimizing Tree Traversal Algorithms, Youngjoon Jo

Open Access Dissertations

Many domains in computer science, from data-mining to graphics to computational astrophysics, focus heavily on irregular applications. In contrast to regular applications, which operate over dense matrices and arrays, irregular programs manipulate and traverse complex data structures like trees and graphs. As irregular applications operate on ever larger datasets, their performance suffers from poor locality and parallelism. Programmers are burdened with the arduous task of manually tuning such applications for better performance. Generally applicable techniques to optimize irregular applications are highly desired, yet scarce.

In this dissertation, we argue that, for an important subset of irregular programs which arises in …