Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pico: An Object-Oriented Framework for Parallel Branch and Bound

2001; Elsevier BV; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s1570-579x(01)80014-8

2212-1145

Jonathan Eckstein, Cynthia A. Phillips, William E. Hart,

Interconnection Networks and Systems

This paper describes the design of PICO, a C++ framework for implementing general parallel branch-and-bound algorithms. The PICO framework provides a mechanism for the efficient implementation of a wide range of branch-and-bound methods on an equally wide range of parallel computing platforms. We first discuss the basic architecture of PICO, including the application class hierarchy and the package's serial and parallel layers. We next describe the design of the serial layer, and its central notion of manipulating subproblem states. Then, we discuss the design of the parallel layer, which includes flexible processor clustering levels and communication rates, various load balancing mechanisms, and a non-preemptive task scheduler running on each processor. We close by describing the application of the package to a simple branch-and-bound method for mixed integer programming, along with computational results on the ASCI Red massively parallel computer.