Targeting the Cell Broadband Engine for constraint-based local search

Abstract

We investigated the use of the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE) for constraint-based local search and combinatorial optimization applications. We presented a parallel version of a constraint-based local search algorithm that was chosen because it fits very well the Cell/BE architecture because it requires neither shared memory nor communication among processors. The performance study on several large optimization bench- marks shows mostly linear time speedups, sometimes even super linear. These experiments were carried out on a dual-Cell IBM (Armonk, NY, USA) blade with 16 processors. Besides getting speedups, the execution times exhibit a much smaller variance that benefits applications where a timely reply is critical.