Planning the cook of a time consuming optimization problem? Have you considered to let a crowd of volunteers to help you in this endeavor? In a volunteer-based system, volunteers provide you with free ingredients (CPU cycles, memory, internet connection,..) to be seasoned with only a pinch of peer-to-peer or desktop-grid technology.
If you are looking for a delicious cook of a volunteer-based evolutionary algorithm, you can find our recipe in this paper published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (pre-print version available here)
Title: «Designing robust volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms»
Abstract This paper tackles the design of scalable and fault-tolerant evolutionary algorithms computed on volunteer platforms. These platforms aggregate computational resources from contributors all around the world. Given that resources may join the system only for a limited period of time, the challenge of a volunteer-based evolutionary algorithm is to take advantage of a large amount of computational power that in turn is volatile. The paper analyzes first the speed of convergence of massively parallel evolutionary algorithms. Then, it provides some guidance about how to design efficient policies to overcome the algorithmic loss of quality when the system undergoes high rates of transient failures, i.e. computers fail only for a limited period of time and then become available again. In order to provide empirical evidence, experiments were conducted for two well-known problems which require large population sizes to be solved, the first based on a genetic algorithm and the second on genetic programming. Results show that, in general, evolutionary algorithms undergo a graceful degradation under the stress of losing computing nodes. Additionally, new available nodes can also contribute to improving the search process. Despite losing up to 90% of the initial computing resources, volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms can find the same solutions in a failure-prone as in a failure-free run.