News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Silent (R)evolution of SAT by zero_k on Friday May 26, 2023 @10:15AM (#36084461)
There is a solver that can make effective use of GPUs (shameless self-promotion): https://github.com/nicolasprevot/GpuShareSat

It is a VERY fun work. Code entirely written by Nicolas Prevot, a magician of CUDA. Paper link here: https://comp.nus.edu.sg/~meel/Papers/sat21-psm.pdf

Re:The Silent (R)evolution of SAT by bmc7505 on Friday May 26, 2023 @11:03AM (#36085115)
Oh you're one of the GPUShareSat guys, I forgot about that one. Would you say the main obstacle to scaling to a million processors is the synchronization overhead or are there certain instances from the SATComp benchmark that exhibited poor scaling with increased parallelism? Do you think sharing is essential or do you have any ideas how to improve communication-free strategies, i.e., parallelism without clause sharing using divide-and-conquer or randomized search? Six years ago, your co-author Mate wrote a very pessimistic remark on GPU-based SAT solvers here [1], I'm curious whether he still believes this or if his option was changed during the course of the project and what changed his mind? Thanks!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667565

Re:The Silent (R)evolution of SAT by zero_k on Saturday May 27, 2023 @02:35AM (#36092559)
Hahha, I am Mate :) I still think that GPGPU can't help in the core of the algorithm. However, I was pleasantly surprised with Nicolas' work. He is a proper magician, and he had a great idea and made it work. Notice that he didn't make the GPU do propagation/conflict generation. Instead, he used it to better distribute clauses between the threads that do all of that. In a way, he improved clause cleaning. When I saw his work, I was very-very happy.

I still hold that GPGPUs can't do CDCL. However, they may be helpful in some of its sub-parts, or may be able to run another algorithm for solving SAT that we haven't invented yet.

Just my 2 cents,

Mate