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Designing robust volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms

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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.

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Notes

  1. Source code for the experiments is available at https://forja.rediris.es/svn/geneura/peerevogen, published under GPL v3 public license.

  2. These samples are available together with the source code for the experiments at https://forja.rediris.es/svn/geneura/peerevogen.

  3. This issue has been solved by the P2P computing community with the use of hubs or superpeers, a set of public and reliable nodes keeping a partial knowledge of the connected network. See [39] for more details.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Claudia Höfer for proofreading this manuscript. This work was supported by the Luxembourg FNR Green@Cloud project (INTER/CNRS/11/03) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science Project (TIN2011-28627-C04).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FSTC-CSC/SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg city, Luxembourg

    J. L. J. Laredo & P. Bouvry

  2. Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva, Switzerland

    D. L. González

  3. University of Extremadura, Mérida, Spain

    F. Fernández de Vega

  4. ATC-ETSIIT, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    M. G. Arenas & J. J. Merelo

  5. Laseeb, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    C. M. Fernandes

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Correspondence to J. L. J. Laredo.

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Laredo, J.L.J., Bouvry, P., González, D.L. et al. Designing robust volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 15, 221–244 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-014-9213-5

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