Parallel Local Search in Comet

The availability of commodity multiprocessors offers significant opportunities for addressing the increasing computational requirements of optimization applications. To leverage these potential benefits, it is important however to make parallel processing easily accessible to a wide audience of optimization programmers. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing parallel programming abstractions that keep the distance between sequential and parallel local search algorithms as small as possible. The abstractions, that include parallel loops, interruptions, and thread pools, are compositional and cleanly separate the optimization program and the parallel instructions. They have been evaluated experimentally on a variety of applications, including facility location and coloring, for which they provide significant speedups.

[1]  Renata M. Aiex,et al.  Parallel GRASP with path-relinking for job shop scheduling , 2003, Parallel Comput..

[2]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  A constraint-based architecture for local search , 2002, OOPSLA '02.

[3]  Joxan Jaffar,et al.  Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP’99 , 1999, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[4]  Jin-Kao Hao,et al.  Tabu Search for Graph Coloring, T-Colorings and Set T-Colorings , 1999 .

[5]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  A decomposition-based implementation of search strategies , 2004, TOCL.

[6]  Silvano Martello,et al.  Meta-Heuristics: Advances and Trends in Local Search Paradigms for Optimization , 2012 .

[7]  Rohit Chandra,et al.  Parallel programming in openMP , 2000 .

[8]  Francesca Rossi,et al.  Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2003 , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[9]  Laurent Perron.  Search Procedures and Parallelism in Constraint Programming , 1999, CP.

[10]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  Control Abstractions for Local Search , 2003, CP.

[11]  Pascal Van Hentenryck,et al.  Nondeterministic Control for Hybrid Search , 2005, CPAIOR.

[12]  Mauro Dell'Amico,et al.  Applying tabu search to the job-shop scheduling problem , 1993, Ann. Oper. Res..

[13]  Mark Wallace,et al.  Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming – CP 2004 , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[14]  Liyuan Liu,et al.  Constraint-Based Combinators for Local Search , 2004, CP.

[15]  L. Dagum,et al.  OpenMP: an industry standard API for shared-memory programming , 1998 .