Abstract
We propose the Embarrassingly Parallel Search, a simple and efficient method for solving constraint programming problems in parallel. We split the initial problem into a huge number of independent subproblems and solve them with available workers, for instance cores of machines. The decomposition into subproblems is computed by selecting a subset of variables and by enumerating the combinations of values of these variables that are not detected inconsistent by the propagation mechanism of a CP Solver. The experiments on satisfaction problems and optimization problems suggest that generating between thirty and one hundred subproblems per worker leads to a good scalability. We show that our method is quite competitive with the work stealing approach and able to solve some classical problems at the maximum capacity of the multi-core machines. Thanks to it, a user can parallelize the resolution of its problem without modifying the solver or writing any parallel source code and can easily replay the resolution of a problem.
This work was partially supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Aeolus ANR-2010-SEGI-013-01 and Vacsim ANR-11-INSE-004) and OSEO (Pajero).
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Régin, JC., Rezgui, M., Malapert, A. (2013). Embarrassingly Parallel Search. In: Schulte, C. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8124. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40627-0_45
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