Joining forces in solving large-scale quadratic assignment problems in parallel

Program libraries are one way to make the cooperation between specialists from various fields successful: the separation of application-specific knowledge from application independent tasks ensures portability, maintenance, extensibility, and flexibility. This paper demonstrates the success in combining problem-specific knowledge for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) with the raw computing power offered by contemporary parallel hardware by using the library of parallel search algorithms ZRAM. The solutions of 10 previously unsolved large standard test-instances of the QAP are presented