A General Purpose Branch and Bound Parallel Algorithm

In this paper a parallel algorithm for branch and bound applications is proposed. The algorithm is a general purpose one and it can be used to parallelize effortlessly any sequential branch and bound style algorithm, that is written in a certain format. It is a distributed dynamic scheduling algorithm, i.e. each node schedules the load of its cores, it can be used with different programming platforms and architectures and is a hybrid algorithm (OpenMP, MPI). To prove its validity and efficiency the proposed algorithm has been implemented and tested with numerous examples in this paper that are described in detail. A speed-up of about 9 has been achieved for the tested examples, for a cluster of three nodes with four cores each.