Session Abstract</strong><div></div><div><p>Branch-and-bound is a widely used technique for efficiently searching for solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. In this session, we will introduce BranchReduce, an open-source Java library for performing distributed branch-and-bound on a Hadoop cluster under YARN. Applications only need to write code that is specific to their optimization problem (namely the branching rule, the lower bound computation, and the upper bound computation), and BranchReduce handles deploying the application to the cluster, managing the execution, and periodically rebalancing the search space across the machines. We will give an overview of how BranchReduce works and then walk through an example that solves a scheduling problem with a near-linear speedup over a single machine implementation.