Runtime Analysis of Unbalanced Block-Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms

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Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVII (PPSN 2022)

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Abstract

We revisit the analysis of the (\(1\)+\(\lambda \)) EA in a parallel setting when the offspring population size is significantly larger than the number of processors available. If the workload is not balanced across the processors, existing runtime results do not transfer directly. We therefore consider two new scenarios that produce unbalanced processors: (1) when the computation time of the fitness function is variable and depends on the structure of the individual, and (2) when processing is interrupted as soon as a viable offspring is found on one of the machines. We derive parallel execution times for both these models as a function of both the population size and the number of parallel machines. We discuss the potential trade-off between communication overhead and execution time, and we conduct some experiments.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this work, we will instead adopt the terminology master-worker.

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Correspondence to Andrew M. Sutton .

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Aboutaib, B., Sutton, A.M. (2022). Runtime Analysis of Unbalanced Block-Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms. In: Rudolph, G., Kononova, A.V., Aguirre, H., Kerschke, P., Ochoa, G., Tušar, T. (eds) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XVII. PPSN 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13399. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14721-0_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14721-0_39

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