[wpdm_file id=2] UPDATE: Fixed crash, UPDATE2: fixed looking for Gaussian elimination library

In the last days of the competition deadline, I have improved the following on the SAT solver:

• Adding N new variables is now possible in one go. This reduces variable addition overhead, especially when having many threads.
• Memory allocation overhead per new clause addition is now much smaller thanks to judicious use of globally allocated temporaries. Using such temporaries is very dangerous as CryptoMiniSat uses addClause() from multiple places in the code in a recursive manner. However, I only use the temporaries for add_clause_outer(), so things should be fine.
• If more than 0.5M variables or 1.5M binary clauses are in the problem, on-the-fly hyper-binary resolution and transitive reduction is turned off during 1st-decision-level search. This is kind of like probing, but during search. However, unlike probing, it cannot time-out and switch off these systems in case they takes too much time.
• Diversified the threads’ parameters. Also, I reduced the number of threads to 8. I wanted to run with 12, but it’s a bit dangerous from a memory-usage perspective: there is only 24GB available for 12 cores, which means 2GB/core. Some problems take more than 2GB just to parse into the watchlists.
• Check total memory usage at startup of threads and if too much, halve the total number of threads. This is an emergency measure in case things go wild due to very weird CNF.

Overall these are small changes but allow for a much faster startup. For example a notorious problem, AProVE07-11.cnf, now starts in 2.5s instead of 4.5s. As far as I can tell, this is very similar to the startup time of lingeling on this instance. However, lingeling only uses 1/3rd the memory (~250MB) thanks to a more tight memory manager plus I suspect it doesn’t have a couple of datastructs that I keep around.

The other difference, about OTF hyper-binary resolution, allows for large problems to actually get to the point of solving instead of getting stuck at adding and removing useless binary clauses. Let’s hope all goes well for the competition :)