Browser-based distributed evolutionary computation: performance and scaling behavior
Proceedings of the 2007 GECCO conference companion on Genetic and evolutionary computation, page 2851--2858. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)DOI: 10.1145/1274000.1274083
Abstract
The challenge of ad-hoc computing is to find the way of taking advantage of spare cycles in an efficient way that takes into account all capabilities of the devices and inter connections available to them. In this paper we explore distributed evolutionary computation based on the Ruby on Rails framework, which overlays a Model-View-Controller on evolutionary computation. It allows anybody with a web browser (that is, mostly everybody connected to the Internet) to participate in an evolutionary computation experiment. Using a straight forward farming model, we consider different factors, such as the size of the population used. We are mostly interested in how they impact on performance, but also the scaling behavior when a non-trivial number of computers is applied to the problem. Experiments show the impact of different packet sizes on performance, as well as a quite limited scaling behavior, due tothe characteristics of the server. Several solutions for that problem are proposed.
