Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Heterogeneous Environments

Distributed computing environments are usually composed of many heterogeneous computers able to work cooperatively. We analyze the impact in the performance of a parallel metaheuristic when it is executed using a set of heterogeneous computing resources. Following a well-defined methodology, the aim of the paper is to use all the computing resources but at the same time to be efficient in time. Our conclusion is that both the solution quality and the numeric effort are comparable to that achieved by using a (faster) homogeneous platform, the traditional environment to execute this kind of algorithms.