A parallel framework for reverse search using mts

Abstract: We describe mts, which is a generic framework for parallelizing certain types of tree search programs, that (a) provides a single common wrapper containing all of the parallelization, and (b) minimizes the changes needed to the existing single processor legacy code. The mts code was derived from ideas used to develop mplrs, a parallelization of the reverse search vertex enumeration code lrs. The tree search properties required for the use of mts are satisfied by any reverse search algorithm as well as other tree search methods such as backtracking and branch and bound. mts is programmed in C, uses the MPI parallel environment, and can be run on a network of computers. As examples we parallelize two simple existing reverse search codes: generating topological orderings and generating spanning trees of a graph. We give computational results comparing the parallel codes with state of the art sequential codes for the same problems.