DisSLib:ICA

Date
2013-09-13
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Abstract
Knowledge-based search is a set of concepts that can help software developers build better search systems. Until recently, developers often build sequential knowledge-based search systems (making use of only a single processor core) because sequential systems are easier to develop. For further speed improvements, developers could rely on new processors to run at a faster clock rate. However, with the recent trend in processor design, clock rates have remained stagnant while processors are moving towards having multiple processing cores. To make use of these additional processing capabilities, developers now need to {\it distribute} their search to the available processing cores. Building distributed based search systems is a difficult and time consuming process because not only are distributed systems difficult to develop, but knowledge-based search systems are not readily able to be distributed. Fortunately, there are different distribution paradigms that provide guidelines as to how the search process can be distributed. This thesis introduces DisSLib:ICA, a software library for building distributed knowledge-based search systems based on the improving on the competition approach paradigm. The main goal of DisSLib:ICA is to allow developers to build distributed search systems in the same manner, and with the same amount of effort, as it would normally take to build a sequential search system. It achieves this by handling the communication and multi-threading tasks along with providing developers a skeleton structure of a search system that can be extended to fit the developer's concrete search problem. To evaluate DisSLib:ICA, we have built three search systems that solves different problems using the library. Our results have shown that the library allows developers to build distributed systems with approximately the same amount of effort as it would take to build a sequential system. In addition, our experiments show that by using the improving on the competition approach paradigm, the library produces synergistic speedups.
Description
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science
Citation
Hoang, D. (2013). DisSLib:ICA (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25723