Validating evolutionary algorithms on volunteer computing grids

Authors:
Travis Desell;Malik Magdon-Ismail;Boleslaw Szymanski;Carlos A. Varela;Heidi Newberg;David P. Anderson
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY;Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY;Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY;Department of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY;Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY;U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Venue:
DAIS'10 Proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Computational science is placing new demands on distributed computing systems as the rate of data acquisition is far outpacing the improvements in processor speed. Evolutionary algorithms provide efficient means of optimizing the increasingly complex models required by different scientific projects, which can have very complex search spaces with many local minima. This work describes different validation strategies used by MilkyWay@Home, a volunteer computing project created to address the extreme computational demands of 3-dimensionally modeling the Milky Way galaxy, which currently consists of over 27,000 highly heterogeneous and volatile computing hosts, which provide a combined computing power of over 1.55 petaflops. The validation strategies presented form a foundation for efficiently validating evolutionary algorithms on unreliable or even partially malicious computing systems, and have significantly reduced the time taken to obtain good fits of MilkyWay@Home’s astronomical models.