Engineering Commons^™

Optimal Communication Structures For Concurrent Computing, Andrii Berdnikov

Doctoral Dissertations

This research focuses on communicative solvers that run concurrently and exchange information to improve performance. This “team of solvers” enables individual algorithms to communicate information regarding their progress and intermediate solutions, and allows them to synchronize memory structures with more “successful” counterparts. The result is that fewer nodes spend computational resources on “struggling” processes. The research is focused on optimization of communication structures that maximize algorithmic efficiency using the theoretical framework of Markov chains. Existing research addressing communication between the cooperative solvers on parallel systems lacks generality: Most studies consider a limited number of communication topologies and strategies, while the …

Computational Model For Neural Architecture Search, Ram Deepak Gottapu

Doctoral Dissertations

"A long-standing goal in Deep Learning (DL) research is to design efficient architectures for a given dataset that are both accurate and computationally inexpensive. At present, designing deep learning architectures for a real-world application requires both human expertise and considerable effort as they are either handcrafted by careful experimentation or modified from a handful of existing models. This method is inefficient as the process of architecture design is highly time-consuming and computationally expensive.

The research presents an approach to automate the process of deep learning architecture design through a modeling procedure. In particular, it first introduces a framework that treats …

Inference In Networking Systems With Designed Measurements, Chang Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Networking systems consist of network infrastructures and the end-hosts have been essential in supporting our daily communication, delivering huge amount of content and large number of services, and providing large scale distributed computing. To monitor and optimize the performance of such networking systems, or to provide flexible functionalities for the applications running on top of them, it is important to know the internal metrics of the networking systems such as link loss rates or path delays. The internal metrics are often not directly available due to the scale and complexity of the networking systems. This motivates the techniques of inference …

Achieving High Reliability And Efficiency In Maintaining Large-Scale Storage Systems Through Optimal Resource Provisioning And Data Placement, Lipeng Wan

Doctoral Dissertations

With the explosive increase in the amount of data being generated by various applications, large-scale distributed and parallel storage systems have become common data storage solutions and been widely deployed and utilized in both industry and academia. While these high performance storage systems significantly accelerate the data storage and retrieval, they also bring some critical issues in system maintenance and management. In this dissertation, I propose three methodologies to address three of these critical issues.

First, I develop an optimal resource management and spare provisioning model to minimize the impact brought by component failures and ensure a highly operational experience …

Developing An Optimal Model For Infant Home Visitation, Isaac Atuahene

Doctoral Dissertations

The United States, Great Britain, Denmark, Canada and many other countries have accepted home visitation (HV) as a promising strategy for interventions for infants after births and for their mothers. Prior HV studies have focused on theoretical foundations, evaluations of programs, cost/benefit analysis and cost estimation by using hospital/payer/insurance data to prove its effectiveness and high cost. As governments and private organizations continue to fund HVs, it is an opportune time to develop and formulate operations research (OR) models of HV coverage, quality and cost so they might be used in program implementation as done for adult home healthcare (HHC) …

Modeling And Control Of Nanoparticle Bloodstream Concentration For Cancer Therapies, Scarlett S. Bracey

Doctoral Dissertations

Currently, the most commonly used treatments for cancerous tumors (chemotherapy, radiation, etc.) have almost no method of monitoring the administration of the treatment for adverse effects in real time. Without any real time feedback or control, treatment becomes a "guess and check" method with no way of predicting the effects of the drugs based on the actual bioavailability to the patient's body. One particular drug may be effective for one patient, yet provide no benefit to another. Doctors and scientists do not routinely attempt to quantifiably explain this discrepancy. In this work, mathematical modeling and analysis techniques are joined together …