Abstract
Metaheuristics are gaining increased attention as an efficient way of solving hard global optimization problems. Differential Evolution (DE) is one of the most popular algorithms in that class. However, its application to realistic problems results in excessive computation times. Therefore, several parallel DE schemes have been proposed, most of them focused on traditional parallel programming interfaces and infrastructures. However, with the emergence of Cloud Computing, new programming models, like Spark, have appeared to suit with large-scale data processing on clouds. In this paper we investigate the applicability of Spark to develop parallel DE schemes to be executed in a distributed environment. Both the master-slave and the island-based DE schemes usually found in the literature have been implemented using Spark. The speedup and efficiency of all the implementations were evaluated on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, concluding that the island-based solution is the best suited to the distributed nature of Spark. It achieves a good speedup versus the serial implementation, and shows a decent scalability when the number of nodes grows.
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Acknowledgements
This research received financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (and the FEDER) through the Project SYNBIOFACTORY (grant number DPI2014-55276-C5-2-R). It has been also supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (and the FEDER) through the Project TIN2013-42148-P, and by the Galician Government (Xunta de Galicia) under the Consolidation Program of Competitive Research Units (Network Ref. R2014/041 and Project Ref. GRC2013/055) cofunded by FEDER funds of the EU.
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Teijeiro, D., Pardo, X.C., González, P., Banga, J.R., Doallo, R. (2016). Implementing Parallel Differential Evolution on Spark. In: Squillero, G., Burelli, P. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9598. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31153-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31153-1_6
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