Asynchronous migration for parallel genetic programming on a computer cluster with multi-core processors

Abstract

An island model is a typical implementation of genetic programming on parallel computers with distributed memory. The island model has a migration facility that sends/receives some individuals in an island to/from another island to maintain diversity. The island model requires synchronization to migrate same-generation individuals between islands, and this synchronization causes an increase in computation time. This article proposes a new parallel genetic programming implementation based on the island model with asynchronous migration. Most recent computers are equipped with one or more multi-core processors, and are suitable for multi-threading. Therefore we employ a communication thread for migration between islands. The communication thread on a processor communicates with the communication thread on another processor to migrate individuals at appropriate intervals. Since the migration and other genetic operations can be independently processed on each core, and since we allow the exchange of individuals of different generations, no synchronization is needed in our implementation. In addition, a fitness calculation is also executed in parallel by the remaining cores. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the computation time to about 17% in serial GP by using 40 threads.