Parallel solving in Minizinc from the command line

Question

The Minizinc IDE has a parallel solver option ("Number of threads") in the config section. When compiling from the commandline, however, the mzn2fzn binary doesn't seem to support a parallel option. Is it possible to solve in parallel from a commandline-compiled file?

Answer 1

You can either use MiniZinc via the integrated development environment (IDE) or via commandline call. I am using IDE 2.0.8

In the IDE, use the configuration tab to specify the number of threads to be used for searching/solving. Depending on the selected backend, you may end up with an error message, that multi-threading is not supported for the respective backend.

Via commandline, you can either call compiler and backend separately, or you can use minizinc.exe to act as an umbrella tool to call them sequentially. All the tools have a commandline option --help to explain the parameters. minizinc.exe accepts -p or --parallel to run the backend in multi-threading mode, provided this is supported.