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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.