Abstract
Distributed computing is increasingly important at a time when the doubling of the number of transistors on a processor every 18 months no longer translates in a doubling of speed but instead a doubling of the number of cores. Unfortunately, it also places significant conceptual and implementation burden on programmers. This paper aims at addressing this challenge for constraint-based local search (CBLS), whose search procedures typically exhibit inherent parallelism stemming from multistart, restart, or population-based techniques whose benefits have been demonstrated both experimentally and theoretically. The paper presents abstractions that allows distributed CBLS programs to be close to their sequential and parallel counterparts, keeping the conceptual and implementation overhead of distributed computing minimal. A preliminary implementation in Comet exhibits significant speed-ups in constraint satisfaction and optimization applications. The implementation also scales well with the number of machines. Of particular interest is the observation that generic abstractions of CBLS and CP, such as models and solutions, and advanced control structures such as events and closures, play a fundamental role to keep the distance between sequential and distributed CBLS programs small. As a result, the abstractions directly apply to CP programs using multistarts or restarts procedures.
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Michel, L., See, A., Van Hentenryck, P. (2006). Distributed Constraint-Based Local Search. In: Benhamou, F. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming - CP 2006. CP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4204. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11889205_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11889205_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-46267-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46268-2
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