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Evolutionary algorithms on volunteer computing platforms: The MilkyWay@Home project. (English) Zbl 1202.68472

Fernández de Vega, Francisco (ed.) et al., Parallel and distributed computational intelligence. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-10674-3/hbk; 978-3-642-10675-0/ebook). Studies in Computational Intelligence 269, 63-90 (2010).
Summary: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) require large scale computing resources when tackling real world problems. Such computational requirement is derived from inherently complex fitness evaluation functions, large numbers of individuals per generation, and the number of iterations required by EAs to converge to a satisfactory solution. Therefore, any source of computing power can significantly benefit researchers using evolutionary algorithms. We present the use of Volunteer Computing (VC) as a platform for harnessing the computing resources of commodity machines that are nowadays present at homes, companies and institutions. Taking into account that currently desktop machines feature significant computing resources (dual cores, gigabytes of memory, gigabit network connections, etc.), VC has become a cost-effective platform for running time consuming evolutionary algorithms in order to solve complex problems, such as finding substructure in the Milky Way Galaxy, the problem we address in detail in this chapter.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1183.68011].

MSC:

68W05 Nonnumerical algorithms

Software:

ParaDisEO; ECJ
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