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Concurrent Clause Strengthening

  • Conference paper
Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2013 (SAT 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7962))

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Abstract

This work presents a novel strategy for improving SAT solver performance by using concurrency. Rather than aiming to parallelize search, we use concurrency to aid a conventional CDCL search procedure. More concretely, our work extends a conventional CDCL SAT solver with a second computation thread, which is solely used to strengthen the clauses learned by the solver. This provides a simple and natural way to exploit the availability of multi-core hardware.

We have employed our technique to extend two well established solvers, MiniSAT and Glucose. Despite its conceptual simplicity the technique yields a significant improvement of those solvers’ performances, in particular for unsatisfiable benchmarks. For such benchmarks an extensive empirical evaluation revealed a remarkably consistent reduction of the wall clock time required to determine unsatisfiability, as well as an ability to solve more benchmarks in the same CPU time.

The proposed technique can be applied in combination with existing parallel SAT solving techniques, including both portfolio and search space splitting approaches. The approach presented here can thus be seen as orthogonal to those existing techniques.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Science, Department of Information and Computer Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 15400, FI-00076, Aalto, Finland

    Siert Wieringa & Keijo Heljanko

Authors
  1. Siert Wieringa
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  2. Keijo Heljanko
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. HIIT and Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2 b, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Matti Järvisalo

  2. Computer Science Department, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, SOE-3, 95064, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Allen Van Gelder

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Wieringa, S., Heljanko, K. (2013). Concurrent Clause Strengthening. In: Järvisalo, M., Van Gelder, A. (eds) Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2013. SAT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7962. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39071-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39071-5_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39070-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39071-5

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