Control-Based Clause Sharing in Parallel SAT Solving

Abstract

Conflict driven clause learning, one of the most important component of modern SAT solvers, is also recognized as very important in parallel SAT solving. Indeed, it allows clause sharing between multiple processing units working on related (sub-)problems. However, without limitation, sharing clauses might lead to an exponential blow up in communication or to the sharing of irrelevant clauses. This paper, proposes two innovative policies to dynamically adjust the size of shared clauses between any pair of processing units. The first approach controls the overall number of exchanged clauses whereas the second additionally exploits the relevance quality of shared clauses. Experimental results show important improvements of the state-of the-art parallel SAT solver. Youssef Hamadi, Said Jabbour, Lakhdar Sais