Parallelization of a branch-and-bound algorithm for the maximum weight clique problem

In this paper, parallelization techniques are proposed for the branch-and-bound algorithm OTClique for the maximum weight clique problem. OTClique consists of the precomputation phase and the branch-and-bound phase. The proposed algorithm parallelizes both of them. In the precomputation phase, the construction of optimal tables is parallelized. In the branch-and-bound phase, the proposed algorithm generates small subproblems and assigns them to threads. A technique to share lower and upper bounds is also proposed. Experiments using some benchmarks show that the proposed parallelization techniques improve the performance of OTClique. With an 8-core CPU, the computation time of OTClique becomes 6.91 times shorter on random graphs and 5.38 times on DIMACS benchmarks on average.