With the dissemination of aordable parallel and distributed hardware, parallel and distributed constraint solving has lately been the focus of some attention. To eectually apply the power of distributed computational systems, there must be an eective sharing of the work involved in the search for a solution to a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) between all the participating agents, and it must happen dynami- cally, since it is hard to predict the eort associated with the exploration of some part of the search space. We describe and provide an experimen- tal assessment of an implementation of a work stealing-based approach to parallel CSP solving in a distributed setting.
Search in constraint programming is a time consuming task. Search can be speeded up by exploring subtrees of a search tree in parallel. This paper presents distributed search engines that achieve parallelism by distribution across networked computers. The main point of the paper is a simple design of the parallel search engine. Simplicity comes as an immediate consequence of clearly separating search, concurrency, and distribution. The obtained distributed search engines are simple yet offer substantial speedup on standard network computers.