Abstract
Multicore clusters are widely used to solve combinatorial optimization problems, which require high computing power and a large amount of memory. In this sense, Hash Distributed A* (HDA*) parallelizes A*, a combinatorial optimization algorithm, using the MPI library. HDA* scales well on multicore clusters and on multicore machines. Additionally, there exist several versions of HDA* that were adapted for multicore machines, using the Pthreads library. In this paper, we present Hybrid HDA* (HHDA*), a hybrid parallel search algorithm based on HDA* that combines message-passing (MPI) with shared-memory programming (Pthreads) to better exploit the computing power and memory of multicore clusters. We evaluate the performance and memory consumption of HHDA* on a multicore cluster, using the 15-puzzle as a case study. The results reveal that HHDA* achieves a slightly higher average performance and uses considerably less memory than HDA*. These improvements allowed HHDA* to solve one of the hardest 15-Puzzle instances.
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Notes
- 1.
Efficiency is defined as Sp/N, where Sp is the speedup of the parallel algorithm over the sequential algorithm and N is the number of workers/cores used.
- 2.
15 14 13 12 10 11 8 9 2 6 5 1 3 7 4 0.
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Sanz, V., De Giusti, A., Naiouf, M. (2017). A Hybrid Parallel Search Algorithm for Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems on Multicore Clusters. In: Ibrahim, S., Choo, KK., Yan, Z., Pedrycz, W. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65482-9_62
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