Automatic construction of parallel portfolios via explicit instance grouping

Abstract

Exploiting parallelism is becoming more and more important in designing efficient solvers for computationally hard problems. However, manually building parallel solvers typically requires considerable domain knowledge and plenty of human effort. As an alternative, automatic construction of parallel portfolios (ACPP) aims at automatically building effective parallel portfolios based on a given problem instance set and a given rich configuration space. One promising way to solve the ACPP problem is to explicitly group the instances into different subsets and promote a component solver to handle each of them. This paper investigates solving ACPP from this perspective, and especially studies how to obtain a good instance grouping. The experimental results on two widely studied problem domains, the boolean satisfiability problems (SAT) and the traveling salesman problems (TSP), showed that the parallel portfolios constructed by the proposed method could achieve consistently superior performances to the ones constructed by the state-of-the-art ACPP methods, and could even rival sophisticated hand-designed parallel solvers.