The parallel search bench ZRAM and its applications

Distributed and parallel computation is, on the one hand, the cheapest way to increaseraw computing power. Turning parallelism into a useful tool for solving new problems, onthe other hand, presents formidable challenges to computer science. We believe that parallelcomputation will spread among general users mostly through the ready availability of convenientand powerful program libraries. In contrast to general‐purpose languages, a programlibrary is specialized towards a well‐defined class of problems and algorithms. This narrowfocus permits developers to optimize algorithms, once and for all, for parallel computers ofa variety of common architectures. This paper presents ZRAM, a portable parallel library ofexhaustive search algorithms, as a case study that proves the feasibility of achieving simultaneouslythe goals of portability, efficiency, and convenience of use. Examples of massivecomputations successfully performed with the help of ZRAM illustrate its capabilities anduse.

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