Scalable Local Search on Multicore Computers

Practical computing is undergoing a major shift towards parallelism due to exhaustion of performance gains of other approaches to computer design like increasing clock speed [4]. In a few years, parallel multicore processors with hundreds of concurrent processing threads will be prevalent in common desktop and laptop computers, while web servers having manycore processors will feature even thousands of concurrent processing threads [4]. In this paper, we discuss the question of how to effectively utilize the resources of multicore computers for local search. Local-search methods have been effectively used for large combinatorial problems [22] including complex structures, dynamic changes and anytime computations [1, 14].