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Massively Parallel Constraint Programming for Supercomputers: Challenges and Initial Results

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6140))

Abstract

In this paper we present initial results for implementing a constraint programming solver on a massively parallel supercomputer where coordination between processing elements is achieved through message passing. Previous work on message passing based constraint programming has been targeted towards clusters of computers (see [1,2] for some examples). Our target hardware platform is the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Blue Gene is designed to use a large number of relatively slow (800MHz) processors in order to achieve lower power consumption, compared to other supercomputing platforms. Blue Gene/P, the second generation of Blue Gene, can run continuously at 1 PFLOPS and can be scaled to 884,736-processors to achieve 3 PFLOPS performance. We present a dynamic scheme for allocating sub-problems to processors in a parallel, limited discrepancy tree search [3]. We evaluate this parallelization scheme on resource constrained project scheduling problems from PSPLIB [4].

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References

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Xie, F., Davenport, A. (2010). Massively Parallel Constraint Programming for Supercomputers: Challenges and Initial Results. In: Lodi, A., Milano, M., Toth, P. (eds) Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. CPAIOR 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6140. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13520-0_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13520-0_36

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13519-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13520-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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