Exploring population structures for locally concurrent and massively parallel Evolutionary Algorithms

In this paper we present the Gossip-based Evolvable Agent Model (GossEvAg) within the context of parallel fine-grained Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). It extends the Cellular Evolutionary Algorithm (CEA) definition with two novel features designed to work on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks: every individual is self-scheduled in a single thread and dynamically self-organizes its neighbourhood via newscasting, a gossip protocol. As a consequence of such multi-threading model, each Evolvable Agent (EvAg) updates asynchronously its state at random depending on the underlying platform scheduler. In order to assess the effects of asynchrony and the gossip protocol, we perform an experimental evaluation of the model for a set of discrete optimization problems. As a baseline for comparison we use two canonical genetic algorithms (GA): A steady-state GA (ssGA) and a generational GA (gGA). We also test two more topologies for the EvAg, a complete graph topology which allows panmixia and a Watts-Strogatz topology which has shown good theoretical and empirical results in related papers. We found that leaving the management of the EvAg to the underlying platform scheduler has an interesting emerging feature: the model is able to scale seamlessly in desktop computers without any effort from the practitioner. We measure how the algorithm speed scales by conducting the experiments in a Single and a Dual-Core Processor architectures.