Distributed decomposition over hyperspherical domains

Abstract

We are motivated by an optimization problem arising in computational scaling for optical lithography that reduces to finding the point of minimum radius that lies outside of the union of a set of diamonds centered at the origin of Euclidean space of arbitrary dimension. A decomposition of the feasible region into convex regions suggests a heuristic sampling approach to finding the global minimum. We describe a technique for decomposing the surface of a hypersphere of arbitrary dimension, both exactly and approximately, into a specific number of regions of equal area and small diameter. The decomposition generalizes to any problem posed on a spherical domain where regularity of the decomposition is an important concern. We specifically consider a storage-optimized decomposition and analyze its performance. We also show how the decomposition can parallelize the sampling process by assigning each processor a subset of points on the hypersphere to sample. Finally, we describe a freely available C++ software package that implements the storage-optimized decomposition. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.