A Hierarchical distributed-shared memory Parallel Branch & Bound Application with Pvm and OpenMP for multiprocessor clusters

Branch&Bound (B&B) is a technique widely used to solve combinatorial optimization problems in physics and engineering science. In this paper we show how the combined use of PVM and OpenMP libraries can be a promising approach to exploit the intrinsic parallel nature of this class of application and to obtain efficient code for hybrid computational architectures. We described how both the shared memory and the distributed memory programming models can be applied to implement the same algorithm for the inter-nodes and intra-node parallelization. Some experimental tests on a local area network (LAN) of workstations are finally discussed.