Gridsat: a distributed large scale satisfiability solver for the computational grid

Grid Computing is an emerging field in computer science. Research in this area aims at aggregating distributed, heterogenous and federated resources and make it available to Grid applications. In the past two types of applications have been deployed with varying degrees of success. The first type of applications is embarrassingly parallel (a bag of independent tasks). This category adapts well to a computational grid environment. The second category of applications includes mainly scientific code which is tightly coupled in nature. This type of applications is very hard to deploy in a grid environment. In this thesis we present GridSAT, a new grid application. GridSAT is a distributed complete Boolean satisfiability sower based on the sequential solver Chaff [70]. In addition to its theoretical significance, the satisfiability problem has numerous practical applications. SAT solvers are used in many engineering and scientific fields including circuit design and model checking. GridSAT is able to achieve new results by solving faster those problems that were previously solved by other solvers. Moreover, it was able to solve problems which were left unsolved by other solvers. GridSAT accomplishes these results by achieving two goals. The first is parallelizing the sequential solver in a manner which allows it to run efficiently on a large collection of resources. GridSAT also uses techniques to enable information sharing between the parallel components to avoid redundant work. The second goal is to design and implement the application so that it can adapt to the dynamic conditions of a computational grid environment. The techniques and design used to realize GridSAT can be deployed with other application to achieve new results. In addition, we show how multiple GridSAT instances can cooperate to run efficiently on a common set of resources without explicit synchronization. These experiments represent realistic scenarios where many grid applications share a common resource pool. We have also developed a web portal which accepts problem instances through a standard web browser and returns status and results while shielding users from complexities of running the application manually.

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