Evaluation of a Simple, Scalable, Parallel Best-First Search Strategy
  Large-scale, parallel clusters composed of commodity processors are
increasingly available, enabling the use of vast processing capabilities and
distributed RAM to solve hard search problems. We investigate Hash-Distributed
A* (HDA*), a simple approach to parallel best-first search that asynchronously
distributes and schedules work among processors based on a hash function of the
search state. We use this approach to parallelize the A* algorithm in an
optimal sequential version of the Fast Downward planner, as well as a 24-puzzle
solver. The scaling behavior of HDA* is evaluated experimentally on a shared
memory, multicore machine with 8 cores, a cluster of commodity machines using
up to 64 cores, and large-scale high-performance clusters, using up to 2400
processors. We show that this approach scales well, allowing the effective
utilization of large amounts of distributed memory to optimally solve problems
which require terabytes of RAM. We also compare HDA* to Transposition-table
Driven Scheduling (TDS), a hash-based parallelization of IDA*, and show that,
in planning, HDA* significantly outperforms TDS. A simple hybrid which combines
HDA* and TDS to exploit strengths of both algorithms is proposed and evaluated.
