Distributed Genetic Algorithm Model on Network of Personal Computers

Despite recent advances in desktop computing power, certain civil engineering problems continue to depend on supercomputers and powerful workstations. Although supercomputers and workstations helped in field testing complicated mathematical models, there appears to be a significant gap in widespread technology transfer to the industry. The sluggish progress in transfer of technology to the industry may be attributed to the inability to implement these models on PCs coupled with high costs associated with supercomputers. The paper reports results from an exploratory research that implemented a complicated optimization model based on a distributed genetic algorithm on a network of PCs. PCs that formed the network were hardwired using 16bit 10Base-T Ethernet cards and were made accessible using Peer-to-Peer networking capability, which is a built-in feature of Microsoft Windows 95/NT operating system. The inherent parallelism associated with genetic algorithms coupled with relatively small data exchange between the computers resulted in a significant reduction of computational time. The proposed generalized optimization framework, which can be adopted to model several water resources related problems, is expected to accelerate the transfer of technology to the industry.