Inproceedings,
Building a Parallel Computer System for \$18,000 that Performs a Half Peta-Flop per Day
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 2, page 1484--1490. Orlando, Florida, USA, Morgan Kaufmann, (13-17 July 1999)
Abstract
Techniques of evolutionary computation generally
require significant computational resources to solve
non-trivial problems of interest. Increases in
computing power can be realized either by using a
faster computer or by parallelizing the application.
Techniques of evolutionary computation are especially
amenable to parallelization. This paper describes how
to build a 10-node Beowulf-style parallel computer
system for $18,000 that delivers about a half peta-flop
(1015 floating-point operations) per day on runs of
genetic programming. Each of the 10 nodes of the system
contains a 533 MHz Alpha processor and runs with the
Linux operating system. This amount of computational
power is sufficient to yield solutions (within a couple
of days per problem) to 14 published problems where
genetic programming has produced results that are
competitive with human-produced results.
