A Variant of Concurrent Constraint Programming on GPU

Abstract

The number of cores on graphical computing units (GPUs) is reaching thousands nowadays, whereas the clock speed of processors stagnates. Unfortunately, constraint programming solvers do not take advantage yet of GPU parallelism. One reason is that constraint solvers were primarily designed within the mental frame of sequential computation. To solve this issue, we take a step back and contribute to a simple, intrinsically parallel, lock-free and formally correct programming language based on concurrent constraint programming. We then re-examine parallel constraint solving on GPUs within this formalism, and develop Turbo, a simple constraint solver entirely programmed on GPUs. Turbo validates the correctness of our approach and compares positively to a parallel CPU-based solver.