The scalability analysis of a parallel tree search algorithm

Abstract

Increasing the number of computational cores is a primary way of achieving the high performance of contemporary supercomputers. However, developing parallel applications capable to harness the enormous amount of cores is a challenging task. It is very important to understand the principle limitations of the scalability of parallel applications imposed by the algorithm’s structure. The tree search addressed in this paper has an irregular structure unknown prior to computations. That is why such algorithms are challenging for parallel implementation especially on distributed memory systems. In this paper, we propose a parallel tree search algorithm aimed at distributed memory parallel computers. For this parallel algorithm, we analyze its scalability and show that it is close to the theoretical maximum.