My son Sean was born on the 22nd of August.
Heres the latest paper I've published in JPDC. The Wellcome Trust has paid for it to be made open access.
Andrew J. Page, Thomas M. Keane and Thomas J. Naughton, Multi-heuristic dynamic task allocation using genetic algorithms in a heterogeneous distributed system, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Volume 70, Issue 7, July 2010, 758-766.
We present a multi-heuristic evolutionary task allocation algorithm to dynamically map tasks to processors in a heterogeneous distributed system. It utilizes a genetic algorithm, combined with eight common heuristics, in an effort to minimize the total execution time. It operates on batches of unmapped tasks and can preemptively remap tasks to processors. The algorithm has been implemented on a Java distributed system and evaluated with a set of six problems from the areas of bioinformatics, biomedical engineering, computer science and cryptography. Experiments using up to 150 heterogeneous processors show that the algorithm achieves better efficiency than other state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms.
Some observations on using the search APIs for the 3 major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo. By far the best I've found is Bing, followed by Yahoo, and lastly Google.
To perform a search for Ireland:
For Bing and Yahoo you need to sign up for an API key. It only takes 2 minutes. Google doesnt need an API key. All can return JSON formatted search results (also XML), however each has a proprietary format. All search engines have removed limits on the number of queries you can submit. Bing and Yahoo dont place limits on the number of results that can be returned from a single query, however Google limits you to 64 results for a general search (other searches are more limited). The 'rsz' parameter for Google can be small (4 results) or large (8 results). To retrieve more results for all you can apply an offset, which is the last parameter for each. Overall the search APIs have improved massively over the past year. All thats really missing is a unified search syntax and result set.
For those of you who are interested, here's my PhD thesis:
Adaptive Scheduling in Heterogeneous Distributed Computing Systems.
The main focus of this research is in the area of adaptive scheduling for heterogeneous
distributed systems. Given an unreliable, non-dedicated set of
processing and communication resources, a scheduler is required to allocate
tasks to processors. No information about the state of the system, which
can vary over time, or the tasks to be processed, is known in advance and
thus must be estimated dynamically. Current schedulers do not adequately
address this dynamism. To address this, a property estimation method is
presented, which utilizes a k-Nearest Neighbours algorithm, a smoothed average
and an analytical benchmark. These estimated properties are then
used by two different scheduling techniques, which make less restrictive assumptions
than the current state-of-the-art methods. A multi-heuristic evolutionary
method utilizes a genetic algorithm and eight simple heuristics to
efficiently allocate tasks to processors. A deterministic method utilizes the
error inherent in estimating the properties of the system and the execution
time of tasks, to allocate tasks to processors. The algorithms have been
implemented on a real-world heterogeneous distributed system with up to
150 processors. A set of real-world problems from the areas of cryptography,
bioinformatics, and biomedical engineering were used as a test set to measure
the effectiveness of the scheduling algorithms. Experiments have shown that
both methods achieve better efficiency than other state-of-the-art heuristic
algorithms. Finally, a low memory distributed reconstruction application for
large digital holograms is presented, which has significantly increased the size
of holograms that can be reconstructed, over the previous state-of-the-art.