Out of CPU cycles and in need to do science? No problem!

After the bad experience of spending money in clusters and grids and then spending more time doing maintenance, hack-proofing and installing stuff than science, maybe it is the time to rethink how massive distributed evolutionary computation should be done. Nowadays there are lots of free or use-based resources that can be tapped for doing volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms. That is way my last keynote and tutorial have dealt with that: the IDC Keynote, Low or No Cost Evolutionary computation, which you can access here in Heroku, puts the money where its mouth is: talking and doing volunteer-based evolutionary computing at the same time. The PPSN tutorial, Low or no cost distributed evolutionary computation, touched on the same topic, only longer and with more enphasis on tools.
So finally it is just a matter of a little Javascript and using free cloud resources and you can have your very own massive distributed experiment. Whose results will be published soon enough.

Sistema para la evaluación de la confianza en redes distribuidas

El pasado lunes se presentó el artículo ya anunciado en el anterior post. Como conclusiones, discutimos sobre:

• La necesidad de confianza entre participantes dentro de una red distribuida, principalmente enfocada a actividades P2P.
• La manera de medir esa confianza, de modelarla y los beneficios de hacerlo.
• El obtener las medidas de confianza bien por observación o bien por recomendaciones, y las condiciones que se han de cumplir para una correcta propagación de los valores.
• Conocimiento de los distintos ataques de: bad mouthing, on-off, Sybli, new user y creación de conflictos.
• Discusión sobre los módulos que compondrían un sistema que gestiona la confianza.
• Comentarios sobre las gráficas de resultados y los posibles beneficios de usar este sistema cuando se presentan los ataques mencionados.

La presentación puede consultarse a continuación:

Paper Seminar: A Trust Evaluation Framework in Distributed Networks: Vulnerability Analysis and Defense Against Attacks

El lunes que viene, 21 de enero, se discutirá sobre el trabajo A Trust Evaluation Framework in Distributed Networks: Vulnerability Analysis and Defense Against Attacks, colaboración de los departamentos de Ingeniería Electrónica y de Computación de las universidades de Rhode Island y Maryland. En él se propone una manera de aumentar la seguridad en arquitecturas de red distribuidas, basándose en una medida cuantitativa de la confianza en cada entidad participante. Será en la Sala de Reuniones de la ETSIIT, estáis todos invitados.

Pool based distributed evolutionary algorithms: a minimalistic survey

During the PPSN 2012 conference, we have participated in a workshop on parallel techniques in search, optimization and learning. The style of the workshop has made possible to present a survey paper that describes the different ways how a pool (a set of tuples with create/read/update/delete functions) can be used profitably for evolutionary computation and the tradeoffs involved in the different ways it can be used.
You can access the paper Using Pool-based Evolutionary Algorithms for Scalable and Asynchronous Distributed computing at the workshop site. Here’s the presentation, which I can’t embed.
After the presentation there was a lively discussion on the scalability we should expect and the types of interaction that would work the best; also on security issues and how to check that the client is not cheating.
This survey builds on our work on pool based evolutionary algorithms, which we presented in EvoStar, and relates it to work made on the free Dropbox platform

Last call to submit your contribution to Natural Computing: SI on Distributed Evolutionary Computation in Informal Environments.

The deadline for submission has changed to 5 March 2012.

Papers should be submitted through the Natural Computing system by selecting this special issue (SI: Informal Environments) as “Article Type”.

Call for papers

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Informal computing includes ways of creating computing systems which are not fixed or bound to an organization, such as:

• Parasitic or stealth computing: using computing resources without explicit authorization from the user, for instance by visiting a web page.
• Volunteer computing: the user submits resources to a pool explicitly, by running a program o visiting a web site.
• Freeriding computing: using computing resources which are free or available, to a certain extent, in the network; for instance, using Google Apps or resources such as Wolfram-Alpha. Similar to parasitic computing, except that the provider of those resources knows, but does not care (up to a certain extent).
• Ubiquitous computing: using computing power available in user devices such as mobile phones or other appliances.

Using these (and similar) kinds of computing presents its own challenges, since neither the topology nor the availability of a particular node is known; computing nodes will have different performances and capabilities (and the connection to them will too) so that evolutionary computing paradigms will have to be adapted to them to take full-advantage of the system without losing the essence of evolutionary algorithm.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Complex systems issues in parasitic/volunteer computing
• Emerging computing environments, free or low-price: cloud computing, NoSQL, REST and other web services
• Performance evaluation and measuring  (speed ups, scalability, work load…).
• Adaptation of algorithms to dynamic, ad-hoc environments
• Evolutionary computation and other bioinspired algorithms in P2P, Map/Reduce and other dynamic environments.
• Bioinspired algorithms applied to those types of environments.
• Implementation issues
• Open source implementations

Both theoretical and applied works related to the topics are sought, as well as those that present a framework that is based on an informal computing environment.

Editors

JJ Merelo, University of Granada
Maribel García Arenas, University of Granada
Juan Luis Jiménez Laredo, University of Luxemburg
Francisco Fernández de Vega, University of Extremadura
David Corne, Heriot-Watt University

Call for papers: Natural Computation Special Issue on Distributed Evolutionary Computation in Informal Environments

Introduction

Informal computing includes ways of creating computing systems which are not fixed or bound to an organization, such as:

• Parasitic or stealth computing: using computing resources without explicit authorization from the user, for instance by visiting a web page.
• Volunteer computing: the user submits resources to a pool explicitly, by running a program o visiting a web site.
• Freeriding computing: using computing resources which are free or available, to a certain extent, in the network; for instance, using Google Apps or resources such as Wolfram-Alpha. Similar to parasitic computing, except that the provider of those resources knows, but does not care (up to a certain extent).
• Ubiquitous computing: using computing power available in user devices such as mobile phones or other appliances.

Using these (and similar) kinds of computing presents its own challenges, since neither the topology nor the availability of a particular node is known; computing nodes will have different performances and capabilities (and the connection to them will too) so that evolutionary computing paradigms will have to be adapted to them to take full advantage of the system without losing the essence of evolutionary algorithm.
Thus, the main topics of the workshop are (but will not be limited to):

• Performance prediction and analysis
• New computing paradigms
• Practical applications
• Implementations

Call for papers

The papers should be related to evolutionary computation and other bioinspired metaheuristics such as ant colony optimization algorithms and particle swarm systems.

• Complex systems issues in parasitic/volunteer computing
• Emerging computing environments, free or low-price: cloud computing, NoSQL, REST and other web services
• Performance evaluation and measuring  (speed ups, scalability, work load…).
• Adaptation of algorithms to dynamic, ad-hoc environments
• Evolutionary computation and other bioinspired algorithms in P2P, Map/Reduce and other dynamic environments.
• Bioinspired algorithms applied to those types of environments.
• Implementation issues
• Open source implementations

Both theoretical and applied works related to the topics of the workshop are sought, as well as those that present a framework that is based on an informal computing environment.

Deadline

UpdateDeadline for submission is February 15th. Papers will be submitted through the Natural Computing system, by selecting this special issue (SI: Informal Environments) as «Article Type». Authors from the IWDECIE workshop are specially invited, and their reviews will be taken into consideration.

Editors

JJ Merelo, University of Granada
Maribel García Arenas, University of Granada
Juan Luis Jiménez Laredo, University of Luxemburg
Francisco Fernández de la Vega, University of Extremadura
David Corne, Heriot-Watt University