Design of discrete-coefficient FIR filters on loosely connected parallel machines

This paper presents a new branch-and-bound mixed-integer linear programming-based algorithm for designing discrete-coefficient finite-impulse response (FIR) filters using a cluster of workstations as the computation platform. The discrete coefficient space considered in this paper is the sum of signed power-of-two space, but the technique is also applicable to other discrete coefficient spaces. The key issue determining the success of the algorithm is the ability to partition the original problem into several independent parts that can be distributed to a cluster of machines for solution. The master–slave model is adopted for the control of the machines. Test run results showed that super linear speedup (i.e., the speedup factor is more than the number of machines running in parallel) may be achieved.