Conclusion to the Special Issue on Parallel SAT Solving
Youssef Hamadi · Journal on Satisfiability Boolean Modeling and Computation · 2009
Recent years have shown a major architectural shift in computer hardware.The traditional efficiency gains upcoming from the relentless raise of chips frequencies has been stopped by a thermal wall and performance improvements have to be found elsewhere.The new direction is to add more computing units (cores) to a chip in order to raise its computational power.The products resulting from this multicore strategy are now on every desktop and yet the horizon is wide open since the number of cores is expected to grow exponentially.This technological shift represents an important challenge for many computer sciences fields whose best algorithms have to be rethought for multicore-based parallelization.The goal of this special issue was to officially acknowledge this evolution, and to present recent advances in the parallel processing of SAT problems.Three works were finally selected.