Combining parallel search and parallel consistency in constraint programming
Carl Christian Rolf, Krzysztof Kuchciński · Lund University Publications (Lund University) · 2010
Abstract. Program parallelization becomes increasingly important when new multi-core architectures provide ways to improve performance. One of the great-est challenges of this development lies in programming parallel applications. Declarative languages, such as constraint programming, can make the transition to parallelism easier by hiding the parallelization details in a framework. Automatic parallelization in constraint programming has mostly focused on par-allel search. While search and consistency are intrinsically linked, the consistency part of the solving process is often more time-consuming. We have previously looked at parallel consistency and found it to be quite promising. In this paper we investigate how to combine parallel search with parallel consistency. We evaluate which problems are suitable and which are not. Our results show that paralleliz-ing the entire solving process in constraint programming is a major challenge as parallel search and parallel consistency typically suit different types of problems. 1