Computer Engineering Commons^™

The junction tree approach, with applications in artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and statistics, is often used for computing posterior distributions in probabilistic graphical models. One of the key challenges associated with junction trees is computational, and several parallel computing technologies - including many-core processors - have been investigated to meet this challenge. Many-core processors (including GPUs) are now programmable, unfortunately their complexities make it hard to manually tune their parameters in order to optimize software performance. In this paper, we investigate a machine learning approach to minimize the execution time of parallel junction tree algorithms implemented on a …

Belief propagation over junction trees is known to be computationally challenging in the general case. One way of addressing this computational challenge is to use node-level parallel computing, and parallelize the computation associated with each separator potential table cell. However, this approach is not efficient for junction trees that mainly contain small separators. In this paper, we analyze this problem, and address it by studying a new dimension of node-level parallelism, namely arithmetic parallelism. In addition, on the graph level, we use a clique merging technique to further adapt junction trees to parallel computing platforms. We apply our parallel approach …