Cost-Effective Parallel Processing for H-squared/H-to infinity Controller Synthesis

A distributed version of a homotopy algorithm for solving the H-squared/H-to infinity mixed-norm controller synthesis problem is presented. The main purpose of the study is to explore the possibility of achieving high performance with low cost. Existing UNIX workstations running PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) are utilized. Only the Jacobian matrix computation is distributed and therefore the modification to the original sequential code is minimal. The same algorithm has also been implemented on an Intel Paragon parallel machine. Our implementation shows that acceptable speedup is achieved and the larger the problem sizes, the higher the speedup. Comparing 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. Furthermore, this economical way to achieve high performance computation can easily be realized and incorporated in a practical industrial design environment.