COST-EFFECTIVE PARALLEL-PROCESSING FOR H-2 H-INFINITY CONTROLLER SYNTHESIS/

A distributed version of a homotopy algorithm for solving the H-2/H-in finity mixed-norm controller synthesis problem is presented. The main purpose of the study is to explore the possibility of achieving high p erformance with low cost. Existing UNIX workstations running PVM (Para llel Virtual Machine) are utilized. Only the jacobian matrix computati on is distributed and therefore the modification to the original seque ntial code is minimal. The same algorithm has also been implemented on an Intel Paragon parallel machine. Our implementation shows that acce ptable speed-up is achieved and the larger the problem sizes, the high er the speed-up. Compared with the results from the Intel Paragon, the study concludes that utilizing the existing UNIX workstations can be a very cost-effective approach to shorten computation time. Furthermor e, this economical way to achieve high performance computation can eas ily be realized and incorporated in a practical industrial design envi ronment.