CEDI2013. Experimentación con algoritmos distribuidos usando herramientas libres y gratuitas

En este trabajo se presenta una metodología de experimentación con algoritmo genéticos distribuidos usando servicios de almacenamiento en la nube tales como Dropbox y aplicaciones para gestión de máquinas virtuales tales como VirtualBox. Usando el almacenamiento en la nube como un sistema de intercambio de soluciones entre los diferentes nodos, se tratará de probar la aplicabilidad de esta metodología así como probar las capacidades de estos nuevos algoritmos evolutivos distribuidos.

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

Doing evolutionary algorithms with Dropbox

Why not use Dropbox as its name implies, as a box for dropping individuals that could be interchanged among different islands running evolutionary algorithms?
That’s exactly what we are doing in a series of papers that are being published and presented in IWDECIE, CEC 2011 and GECCO, in last-in, first-out order. This presentation is for the second, presented today in CEC.

Using dropbox for distributed evolutionary computation

View more presentations from Juan Julián Merelo Guervós

What we try to test in this paper is whether we can add a good number of computers (up to 4) without a saturation of the network (or of Dropbox itself), and whether there is a difference between wired and wireless. It so happens there is, but it gets smaller when you increase the number of computers.

Still many tests to to, but for the time being this looks promising. We’ll link the paper when it’s available. For the time being, if you’re interested just send us an email