IDPS: a massively parallel heuristic search algorithm

Presents an efficient SIMD parallel algorithm, called IDPS (iterative deepening parallel search). The performance of four variants of IDPS is studied through experiments conducted on the well known test-bed problem for search algorithms, the 15-puzzle. During the experiments, data were gathered under two different static load-balancing schemes. Under the first scheme, an average efficiency of approximately /sup 3///sub 4/ was obtained for 4 K, 8 K, and 16 K processors. Under the second scheme, average efficiencies of 0.92 and 0.76 were obtained for 8 K and 16 K processors, respectively. It is also shown that for admissible search, linear or superlinear average speedup can be obtained for problems of significant size.<>