Abstract
We explore the use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE for short) for combinatorial optimization applications: we present a parallel version of a constraint-based local search algorithm that has been implemented on a multiprocessor BladeCenter machine with twin Cell/BE processors (total of 16 SPUs per blade). This algorithm was chosen because it fits very well the Cell/BE architecture and requires neither shared memory nor communication between processors, while retaining a compact memory footprint. We study the performance on several large optimization benchmarks and show that this achieves mostly linear time speedups, even sometimes super-linear. This is possible because the parallel implementation might explore simultaneously different parts of the search space and therefore converge faster towards the best sub-space and thus towards a solution. Besides getting speedups, the resulting times exhibit a much smaller variance, which benefits applications where a timely reply is critical.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 97-111 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science |
Volume | 5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Oct 2009 |
Event | 6th International Workshop on Local Search Techniques in Constraint Satisfaction, LSCS 2009 - Lisbon, Portugal Duration: 20 Sept 2009 → … |