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The Ubiquity Generator Framework: 7 Years of Progress in Parallelizing Branch-and-Bound

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Operations Research Proceedings 2017

Part of the book series: Operations Research Proceedings ((ORP))

Abstract

Mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is a general form to model combinatorial optimization problems and has many industrial applications. The performance of MILP solvers has improved tremendously in the last two decades and these solvers have been used to solve many real-word problems. However, against the backdrop of modern computer technology, parallelization is of pivotal importance. In this way, ParaSCIP is the most successful parallel MILP solver in terms of solving previously unsolvable instances from the well-known benchmark instance set MIPLIB by using supercomputers. It solved two instances from MIPLIB2003 and 12 from MIPLIB2010 for the first time to optimality by using up to 80,000 cores on supercomputers. ParaSCIP has been developed by using the Ubiquity Generator (UG) framework, which is a general software package to parallelize any state-of-the-art branch-and-bound based solver. This paper discusses 7 years of progress in parallelizing branch-and-bound solvers with UG.

This work has been supported by the Research Campus MODAL Mathematical Optimization and Data Analysis Laboratories funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF Grant 05M14ZAM). All responsibility for the content of this publication is assumed by the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zuse Institute Berlin, Takustr. 7, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Yuji Shinano

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  1. Yuji Shinano
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Correspondence to Yuji Shinano .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Natalia Kliewer

  2. Management Science Group, Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany

    Jan Fabian Ehmke

  3. Department of Mathematics, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ralf Borndörfer

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Shinano, Y. (2018). The Ubiquity Generator Framework: 7 Years of Progress in Parallelizing Branch-and-Bound. In: Kliewer, N., Ehmke, J., Borndörfer, R. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2017. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89920-6_20

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