Title
Concurrent clause strengthening
Abstract
This work presents a novel strategy for improving SAT solver performance by using concurrency. Rather than aiming to parallelize search, we use concurrency to aid a conventional CDCL search procedure. More concretely, our work extends a conventional CDCL SAT solver with a second computation thread, which is solely used to strengthen the clauses learned by the solver. This provides a simple and natural way to exploit the availability of multi-core hardware. We have employed our technique to extend two well established solvers, MiniSAT and Glucose. Despite its conceptual simplicity the technique yields a significant improvement of those solvers' performances, in particular for unsatisfiable benchmarks. For such benchmarks an extensive empirical evaluation revealed a remarkably consistent reduction of the wall clock time required to determine unsatisfiability, as well as an ability to solve more benchmarks in the same CPU time. The proposed technique can be applied in combination with existing parallel SAT solving techniques, including both portfolio and search space splitting approaches. The approach presented here can thus be seen as orthogonal to those existing techniques.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-39071-5_10
SAT
Keywords
Field
DocType
conventional cdcl sat solver,technique yield,concurrent clause strengthening,unsatisfiable benchmarks,existing technique,proposed technique,cpu time,parallel sat,conventional cdcl search procedure,search space splitting approach,sat solver performance
Concurrency,Computer science,CPU time,Boolean satisfiability problem,Parallel computing,Search procedure,Exploit,Thread (computing),Solver,Computation
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.37
29
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siert Wieringa1884.99
Keijo Heljanko275147.90