SAT and CP - Parallelisation and Applications

This thesis is considered with the parallelisation of solvers which search for either an arbitrary, or an optimum, solution to a problem stated in some formal way. We discuss the parallelisation of two solvers, and their application in three chapters. In the first chapter, we consider SAT, the decision problem of propositional logic, and algorithms for showing the satisfiability or unsatisfiability of propositional formulas. We sketch some proof-theoretic foundations which are related to the strength of different algorithmic approaches. Furthermore, we discuss details of the implementations of SAT solvers, and show how to improve upon existing sequential solvers. Lastly, we discuss the parallelisation of these solvers with a focus on clause exchange, the communication of intermediate results within a parallel solver. The second chapter is concerned with Contraint Programing (CP) with learning. Contrary to classical Constraint Programming techniques, this incorporates learning mechanisms as they are used in the field of SAT solving. We present results from parallelising CHUFFED, a learning CP solver. As this is both a kind of CP and SAT solver, it is not clear which parallelisation approaches work best here. In the final chapter, we will discuss Sorting networks, which are data oblivious sorting algorithms, i. e., the comparisons they perform do not depend on the input data. Their independence of the input data lends them to parallel implementation. We consider the question how many parallel sorting steps are needed to sort some inputs, and present both lower and upper bounds for several cases.