A comparison between MPI and OpenMP branch-and-bound skeletons

This article describes and compares two parallel implementations of branch-and-bound skeletons. Using the C++ programming language, the user has to specify the type of the problem, the type of the solution and the specific characteristics of the branch-and-bound technique. This information is combined with the provided resolution skeletons to obtain a distributed and a shared parallel program. MPI has been used to develop the message passing algorithm and for the shared memory one OpenMP has been chosen. Computational results for the 0/1 knapsack problem on a Sunfire 6800 SMP, a Origin 3000 and a PCs cluster are presented.