  We study the efficiency of parallel tempering Monte Carlo technique for
calculating true ground states of the Edwards-Anderson spin glass model.
Bimodal and Gaussian bond distributions were considered in two and
three-dimensional lattices. By a systematic analysis we find a simple formula
to estimate the values of the parameters needed in the algorithm to find the GS
with a fixed average probability. We also study the performance of the
algorithm for single samples, quantifying the difference between samples where
the GS is hard, or easy, to find. The GS energies we obtain are in good
agreement with the values found in the literature. Our results show that the
performance of the parallel tempering technique is comparable to more powerful
heuristics developed to find the ground state of Ising spin glass systems.
