Re: Re: [Geneticd-devel] First step toward parallel processing is done!

[Jonny M. <jon...@ni...>]

Il 04:25, lunedì 14 gennaio 2002, hai scritto:
> I also ready your notes on how to approach the parallelization of gd.
> Please consider checking out what John Koza and company have done on their
> Beowulf system with Genetic Programming.  Here's the link describing it:
>
> http://www.genetic-programming.com/parallel.html

Good article. It's like my 1.3 point (different populations with the same 
learning set), but the migrating population is a good news to me. 
Since the agent loading (at this time) is sync with the turn ending, we could 
not do this now: the negihbours sending agents around (or the master ordering 
the slaves to send agents around) should wait for others to finish their 
turn, and this is an awful waste of time. But a buffered agent loading isn't 
so hard to do. It's now my #1 priorty, and I'll program that in a brust.

Also, I was thinking that the MASTER serve should have regulated all the 
traffic between clients, but this "topology" topic is great: the slaves can 
communicate on the base of a previous order sent by the master (new "topo" 
command?  (topo means "mouse" in italian...:-) ), freeing the master from a 
high burden.

>
> This approach makes a lot of sense to me.  It provides an inherent
> speciation model, allows for asynchronous execution.  Clients can be of
> different speeds, and, may check in and out of working on a problem at any
> moment during a run.

Yes, clients can check in or out, but they can't drop. Why I did not stick to 
Beowolf or some other parallel computation environment (i.e. mosix?)
Because I want GD to run on many different and remote servers, without having 
to share a common OS sublayer.  So, we have to exhamine what happens when a 
slave drop it's dial-up connection, or breaks down. If it is running a poor 
genetic population, this is not a problem, but if the slave with the winning 
genetic falls somehow off-line forever (i.e. a blackout in local city power 
sources) this could be a disaster. We'll have to think about some redoundancy 
also...

>
> Just my $0.02..  Hope it might be helpful.

Very. I repeat, it is a great Idea. Since I am very busy in coding, I often 
am not able to study the fresh literature about it... any suggestion is 
WELCOME!
Thanks...

Giancarlo