A simulation tool for the performance evaluation of parallel branch and bound algorithms

Parallel computation offers a challenging opportunity to speed up the time consuming enumerative procedures that are necessary to solve hard combinatorial problems. Theoretical analysis of such a parallel branch and bound algorithm is very hard and empirical analysis is not straightforward because the performance of a parallel algorithm cannot be evaluated simply by executing the algorithm on a few parallel systems. The authors will describe a way to simulate the execution of parallel branch and bound algorithms on arbitrary parallel systems in such a way that the memory and cpu requirements are very reasonable. The use of simulation has only minor consequences for the formulation of the algorithm.