FET and parallel computing

[dznela]

Hi. First of all "FET" is great software, thank you for making it.
Now my question:
Does "FET algorithm allow by its nature and is it possible to slightly change or redesign it so, that it can benefit from parallel computing, for example to be able running timetable generation on cluster. Doing so can greatly improve performance especially for complex timetables (in our case sometimes it takes ~ 24 hours to generate on single i5 4gb ram computer for some complex test inputs, when there are many activities, constraints, etc.)

[Liviu Lalescu]

Thank you for the appreciation! Maybe you could share with us your file and your institution's page with the timetable, on the dedicated boards.

If you would like to generate multiple timetables on multiple cores, it would be a bit complicated, but in any case possible. If you have 4 cores, you can start 4 FET instances with different initial random seeds and generate four timetables.

If you refer to generating a single timetable 4 times faster on 4 cores, this is a research problem. I don't know if it is possible, but anyway it seems very difficult. The algorithm of FET was designed for a single core.