A computational technique for optimal control problems having singular arcs†

Finite volume modelling of free surface draining vortices

Use of preconditioned bi-conjugate gradient method in modeling two-phase fluid flow in porous media

The left-preconditioned communication avoiding conjugate gradient (LP-CA-CG) method is applied to the pressure Poisson equation in the multiphase CFD code JUPITER. The arithmetic intensity of the LP-CA-CG method is analyzed, and is dramatically improved by loop splitting for inner product operations and for three term recurrence operations. Two LPCA-CG solvers with block Jacobi preconditioning and with underlap preconditioning are developed. The former is developed based on a hybrid CA approach, in which CA is applied only to global collective communications for inner product operations. The latter is a full CA approach, in which CA is applied also to local point-to-point communications in sparse matrix-vector (SpMV) operations and preconditioning. CA-SpMV requires additional computation for overlapping regions. CA-preconditiong is enabled by underlap preconditioning, which approximates preconditioning for overlapping regions by point Jacobi preconditioning. It is shown that on the K computer, the former is faster, because the performance of local point-to-point communications scales well, and the convergence property becomes worse with underlap preconditioning. The LP-CA-CG solver shows good strong scaling up to 30,000 nodes, where the LP-CA-CG solver achieved higher performance than the original CG solver by reducing the cost of global collective communications by 69 percent.

Semi-analytical model for rough multilayered contacts

We consider the bilinear optimal control of an advection-reaction-diffusion system, where the control arises as the velocity field in the advection term. Such a problem is generally challenging from both theoretical analysis and algorithmic design perspectives, mainly because the state variable depends nonlinearly on the control variable and, an additional divergence-free constraint on the control is coupled together with the state equation. Mathematically, the proof of the existence of optimal solutions is delicate, and, up to now, only some results have been known for a few special cases where additional restrictions are imposed on the space dimension and the regularity of the control. We prove the existence of optimal controls and derive the first-order optimality conditions in general settings without any extra assumptions. Computationally, the well-known conjugate gradient (CG) method can be applied conceptually. However, due to the additional divergence-free constraint on the control variable and the nonlinear relation between the state and control variables, it is challenging to compute the gradient and the optimal stepsize at each CG iteration, and thus nontrivial to implement the CG method. To address these issues, we advocate a fast inner preconditioned CG method to ensure the divergence-free constraint and an efficient inexactness strategy to determine an appropriate stepsize. An easily implementable nested CG method is thus proposed for solving such a complicated problem. For the numerical discretization, we combine finite difference methods for the time discretization and finite element methods for the space discretization. Efficiency of the proposed nested CG method is promisingly validated by the results of some preliminary numerical experiments.

<abstract> <p>The conjugate gradient (CG) method is a method to solve unconstrained optimization problems. Moreover CG method can be applied in medical science, industry, neural network, and many others. In this paper a new three term CG method is proposed. The new CG formula is constructed based on DL and WYL CG formulas to be non-negative and inherits the properties of HS formula. The new modification satisfies the convergence properties and the sufficient descent property. The numerical results show that the new modification is more efficient than DL, WYL, and CG-Descent formulas. We use more than 200 functions from CUTEst library to compare the results between these methods in term of number of iterations, function evaluations, gradient evaluations, and CPU time.</p> </abstract>

This work presents a parallel implementation of the Parareal method using Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc). An optimal control problem of a parabolic partial differential equation with known boundary conditions and initial state is solved, where the minimized cost function relates the controller v usage and the approximation of the solution y to an optimal known function y*, measured by ∥y∥ and ∥y*∥, respectively. The equations that model the process are discretized in space using Finite Elements and in time using Finite Differences. After the discretizations, the problem is transformed to a large linear system of algebraic equations, that is solved by the Conjugate Gradient method. A Parareal preconditioner is implemented to speed up the convergence of the Conjugate Gradient. The main advantage in using the Parareal approach is to speed up the resolution time, when comparing to implementations that use only the Conjugate Gradient or GMRES methods. The implementation developed in this work offers a parallelization relative efficiency for the strong scaling of approximately 70% each time the process count doubles. For weak scaling, 75% each time the process count doubles for a constant solution size per process and 96% each time the process count doubles for a constant data size per process.

An optimal control problem for controlling the cell volume in dehydration and rehydration process

Self-scaled conjugate gradient training algorithms

Numerical experiments with standard conjugate gradient methods showed that the methods FR, DY, and CD have modest numerical performances, being affected by jamming, although they have strong convergence properties. On the other hand, the computational performances of HS, PRP, and LS methods are better, even if their convergence properties are weaker.

Presently, a preferred minimization for strong‐constraint four‐dimensional variational (4D‐Var) assimilation uses a Lanczos‐based conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm. This requires the availability of a square‐root of the background‐error covariance matrix (B). In the context of weak‐constraint 4D‐Var, this requirement might be too restrictive for the formulations of the model error term. It might therefore be desirable to avoid a square‐root decomposition of the augmented background term. An appealing minimization scheme is the double CG minimization employed, for example, in the grid‐point statistical interpolation (GSI) analysis. Realizing the double CG algorithm is a special case of the more general bi‐conjugate gradient (BiCG) method for solving non‐symmetric problems, the present work introduces a Lanczos‐based preconditioning strategy when B, instead of its square‐root, is used initially. Implementation of the scheme is done in the context of the GSI analysis system, and preliminary experiments are presented using its 3D‐Var version. Comparison of the Lanczos‐based CG and the BiCG shows that the algorithms converge at the same rate and to the same solution. Despite the additional computational cost, the importance of the re‐orthogonalization step is also shown to be fundamental to any of these CG algorithms. Furthermore, when using the Hessian eigenvectors for preconditioning, the BiCG behaviour is shown to be comparable to that of the Lanczos‐CG algorithm. Both schemes construct the same approximation of the Hessian with the same number of eigenvectors, and benefit in the same way from the reduction of the condition number. The efficiency, computational cost, and stability of the three algorithms are discussed. Copyright © 2012 Royal Meteorological Society

This paper focuses on the data-driven controller design for optimal control problems of nonlinear nonaffine discrete-time systems. A novel policy gradient and Q-learning (PGQL) adaptive algorithm which learns the optimal control policy from real empirical data is developed without requiring system dynamics. A policy iteration scheme is designed to iteratively update the approximate Q-function, and the control policy is improved via gradient method until they converge to the bounded regions of the optimal Q-function and the optimal control policy, respectively. Two neural networks (NNs) are employed to realize the developed algorithm. Moreover, the convergence analysis of approximate Q-function is established. Since the control policy is parameterized, it can be upgraded through updating the actor-NN parameters in the direction of the performance gradient. Finally, the simulation results are given to verify the performance of the developed PGQL adaptive algorithm.

The conjugate gradient (CG) method is one of the most popular methods to solve nonlinear unconstrained optimization problems. The Hestenes-Stiefel (HS) CG formula is considered one of the most efficient methods developed in this century. In addition, the HS coefficient is related to the conjugacy condition regardless of the line search method used. However, the HS parameter may not satisfy the global convergence properties of the CG method with the Wolfe-Powell line search if the descent condition is not satisfied. In this paper, we use the original HS CG formula with a mild condition to construct a CG method with restart using the negative gradient. The convergence and descent properties with the strong Wolfe-Powell (SWP) and weak Wolfe-Powell (WWP) line searches are established. Using this condition, we guarantee that the HS formula is non-negative, its value is restricted, and the number of restarts is not too high. Numerical computations with the SWP line search and some standard optimization problems demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the new version of the CG parameter in comparison with the latest and classical CG formulas. An example is used to describe the benefit of using different initial points to obtain different solutions for multimodal optimization functions.

A preconditioned Chebyshev basis communication-avoiding conjugate gradient method (P-CBCG) is applied to the pressure Poisson equation in a multiphase thermal-hydraulic CFD code JUPITER, and its computational performance and convergence properties are compared against a preconditioned conjugate gradient (P-CG) method and a preconditioned communication-avoiding conjugate gradient (P-CACG) method on the Oakforest-PACS, which consists of 8,208 KNLs. The P-CBCG method reduces the number of collective communications with keeping the robustness of convergence properties. Compared with the P-CACG method, an order of magnitude larger communication-avoiding steps are enabled by the improved robustness. It is shown that the P-CBCG method is 1.38 $$\times $$ and 1.17 $$\times $$ faster than the P-CG and P-CACG methods at 2,000 processors, respectively.

Network utility maximization (NUM) is an iconic problem in network traffic management which is at the core of many current and emerging network design paradigms – and, in particular, software-defined networks (SDNs). Thus, given the exponential growth of modern-day networks (in both size and complexity), it is crucial to develop scalable algorithmic tools that are capable of providing efficient solutions in time which is dimension-free, i.e., independent–or nearly-independent–on the size of the system. To do so, we leverage a suite of modified gradient methods known as “mirror descent” and we derive a scalable and efficient algorithm for the NUM problem based on gradient exponentiation. We show that the convergence speed of the proposed algorithm only carries a logarithmic dependence on the size of the network, so it can be implemented reliably and efficiently in massively large networks where traditional gradient methods are prohibitively slow. These theoretical results are sub-sequently validated by extensive numerical simulations showing an improvement of several order of magnitudes over standard gradient methods in large-scale networks.