Refine
Document Type
- ZIB-Report (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- mixed integer programming (3) (remove)
Institute
Mixed integer programming (MIP) has become one of the most important techniques in Operations Research and Discrete Optimization. SCIP (Solving Constraint Integer Programs) is currently one of the fastest non-commercial MIP solvers. It is based on the branch-and-bound procedure in which the problem is recursively split into smaller subproblems, thereby creating a so-called branching tree. We present ParaSCIP, an extension of SCIP, which realizes a parallelization on a distributed memory computing environment. ParaSCIP uses SCIP solvers as independently running processes to solve subproblems (nodes of the branching tree) locally. This makes the parallelization development independent of the SCIP development. Thus, ParaSCIP directly profits from any algorithmic progress in future versions of SCIP. Using a first implementation of ParaSCIP, we were able to solve two previously unsolved instances from MIPLIB2003, a standard test set library for MIP solvers. For these computations, we used up to 2048 cores of the HLRN~II supercomputer.
Recently, parallel computing environments have become significantly popular. In order to obtain the benefit of using parallel computing environments, we have to deploy our programs for these effectively. This paper focuses on a parallelization of SCIP (Solving Constraint Integer Programs), which is a MIP solver and constraint integer programming framework available in source code. There is a parallel extension of SCIP named ParaSCIP, which parallelizes SCIP on massively parallel distributed memory computing environments. This paper describes FiberSCIP, which is yet another parallel extension of SCIP to utilize multi-threaded parallel computation on shared memory computing environments, and has the following contributions: First, the basic concept of having two parallel extensions and the relationship between them and the parallelization framework provided by UG (Ubiquity Generator) is presented, including an implementation of deterministic parallelization. Second, the difficulties to achieve a good performance that utilizes all resources on an actual computing environment and the difficulties of performance evaluation of the parallel solvers are discussed. Third, a way to evaluate the performance of new algorithms and parameter settings of the parallel extensions is presented. Finally, current performance of FiberSCIP for solving mixed-integer linear programs (MIPs) and mixed-integer non-linear programs (MINLPs) in parallel is demonstrated.
Portfolio parallelization is an approach that runs several solver instances in parallel and terminates when one of them succeeds in solving the problem. Despite it's simplicity portfolio parallelization has been shown to perform well for modern mixed-integer programming (MIP) and boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) solvers. Domain propagation has also been shown to be a simple technique in modern MIP and SAT solvers that effectively finds additional domain reductions after a variables domain has been reduced. This paper investigates the impact of distributed domain propagation in modern MIP solvers that employ portfolio parallelization. Computational experiments were conducted for two implementations of this parallelization approach. While both share global variable bounds and solutions they communicate differently. In one implementation the communication is performed only at designated points in the solving process and in the other it is performed completely asynchronously. Computational experiments show a positive performance impact of communicating global variable bounds and provide valuable insights in communication strategies for parallel solvers.