“Optimization on GPUs” Workshop with Prof. Sungho Shin (MIT Chemical Engineering)MIT 화학공학과 신성호 교수님 초청 「GPU를 이용한 최적화 Workshop」 개최
As process models become more sophisticated, the number of variables and constraints has grown to hundreds of thousands or even millions, making computation time the bottleneck in optimization. To explore how such large-scale problems can be solved on GPUs, we invited Prof. Sungho Shin of MIT Chemical Engineering, who has led the development of GPU-based nonlinear programming (NLP) solvers, and held the “Optimization on GPUs” workshop on August 31 in Room 201 of the Convergence Education Innovation Center (E5-1). The workshop began by examining the causes of computational bottlenecks in large-scale process optimization and why GPUs are needed, and then covered a methodology for replacing pivoting, which hinders parallelization in the iterations of interior point methods, with a form that can be processed on GPUs. After an introduction to the structure of GPU-based optimization solvers, the types of problems they can address, and practical considerations for adopting them, participants took part in a hands-on session in which they formulated optimization problems in Julia and solved them with a GPU-based solver. The workshop concluded with a discussion of how these methods can be applied to process superstructure optimization and dynamic optimization. Through this workshop, we secured a technical option for easing the computational bottleneck that arises as process superstructures grow in size, and set up a hands-on environment in which researchers from participating institutions could build skills with GPU-based optimization tools. The workshop was organized as part of the “AI- and Robot-based Autonomous Chemical Process Design Research Group,” a government-funded research institute alliance project of the CNU RISE program, and was attended by 51 participants from academia, industry, and research institutes in the Daejeon area (39 from universities, 9 from industry, and 3 from research institutes), including Chungnam National University, Hanbat National University, KAIST, the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), and SK Innovation.