Blair Archibald, Patrick Maier, Robert Stewart, Phil Trinder, Jan De Beule

Towards Generic Scalable Parallel Combinatorial Search

ABSTRACT:
Combinatorial search problems in mathematics, e.g. in finite geometry,
are notoriously hard; a state-of-the-art backtracking search algorithm
can easily take months to solve a single problem.  There is clearly
demand for parallel combinatorial search algorithms scaling to
hundreds of cores and beyond.  However, backtracking combinatorial
searches are challenging to parallelise due to their sensitivity to
search order and due to the their irregularly shaped search trees.
Moreover, scaling parallel search to hundreds of cores generally
requires highly specialist parallel programming expertise.

This paper proposes a generic scalable framework for solving hard
combinatorial problems.  Key elements are distributed memory task
parallelism (to achieve scale), work stealing (to cope with
irregularity), and generic algorithmic skeletons for combinatorial
search (to reduce the parallelism expertise required).  We outline two
implementations: a mature Haskell Tree Search Library (HTSL) based
around algorithmic skeletons and a prototype C++ Tree Search Library
(CTSL) that uses hand coded applications.

Experiments on maximum clique problems and on a problem in finite
geometry, the search for spreads in H(4,2^2), show that
(1) CTSL consistently outperforms HTSL on sequential runs, and
(2) both libraries scale to 200 cores, e.g. speeding up spreads search
    by a factor of 81 (HTSL) and 60 (CTSL), respectively.
This demonstrates the potential of our generic framework for scaling
parallel combinatorial search to large distributed memory platforms.

KEYWORDS:
Combinatorics;
Backtracking;
Distributed Computing;
Parallelism;
Clique Search;
Finite Geometry