Thursday, April 2, 2009

My Fun Project

I have developed the beginnings of a distributed sat solver in Erlang.  This blog is my place to write down my ideas about writing distributed sat-solvers and also describe what I have developed so far.  It is also an open invitation to people who are interested in this kind of software to commment and discuss the development of a distributed sat-solver in Erlang.

I became interested in developing parallel applications after finishing a CPU heavy graph algorithm and noticing that the program was running for one hour at 50% CPU!  Clearly I would have to rewrite alot of code just to use all the computing power available on my old inspiron laptop.  After reading up on Java threading (I'm a Java developer by day) I stumbled on a blog entry talking about concurrency minus the tricky shared state. It was also a vicious tirade about the ignorance of Java developers.  The author recommended Erlang and I like the idea of concurrent programming without the goto-like hassles of synchronisation.

I picked the boolean satisfiability problem because depth first search doesn't obviously lend itself to easily balanced work sharing. I started coding in a language I barely understood.  It doesn't get much better than this.

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