[Lrde Annonce] New publication: TACAS'19

Greetings, We are pleased to announce that the following paper has been accepted in the 25th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS'19). Please find the title and abstract below. Title and authors: "Modular and Efficient Divide-and-Conquer SAT Solver on Top of the Painless Framework" Ludovic Le Frioux (1,2) Souheib Baarir (1,2,3) Julien Sopena (2,4) Fabrice Kordon (2) (1) LRDE, EPITA, F-94043, Le Kremlin-Bicêtre (2) Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, UMR 7606, F-75005, Paris (3) Université Paris Lumières, Université Paris Nanterre, F-92000, Nanterre (4) Inria, DELYS Team, F-75005, Paris Abstract: Over the last decade, parallel SATisfiability solving has been widely studied from both theoretical and practical aspects. There are two main approaches. First divide-and-conquer (D&C) splits the search space, each solver being in charge of a particular subspace. The second one portfolio launches multiple solvers in parallel, and the first to find a solution ends the computation. However although D&C based approaches seem to be the natural way to work in parallel, portfolio ones experimentally provide better performances. An explanation resides on the difficulties to use the native formulation of the SAT problem (i.e., the CNF form) to compute an a priori good search space partitioning (i.e., all parallel solvers process their subspaces in comparable computational time). To avoid this, dynamic load balancing of the search subspaces is implemented. Unfortunately, this is difficult to compare load balancing strategies since state-of-the-art SAT solvers appropriately dealing with these aspects are hardly adaptable to various strategies than the ones they have been designed for. This paper aims at providing a way to overcome this problem by proposing an implementation and evaluation of different types of divide-and-conquer inspired from the literature. These are relying on the Painless framework, which provides concurrent facilities to elaborate such parallel SAT solvers. Comparison of the various strategies are then discussed. More information at: https://www.lrde.epita.fr/wiki/Publications/le-frioux.19.tacas