[Geneticd-devel] latest news about parallel programming

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

Now Start, Stop, rele (release) and slim (set time share) are working in 
parallel mode. Just create a master engine (be it an intseq, a gfunc or an 
engine of your own); set maximum population (maxp) and food/competitivness 
(samb). If your engine needs a learning set (like gfunc does) load it with 
the lset command, or compile it from a ascii file with ldat. 
Now prep the master engine.
With the slav command, you can enslave another GeneticDaemon (or the same 
daemon), and create a new GEInABox of the same type of the Master Engine. The 
learning set will be transferred to the newly born engne.
Now, if you start the master engine, all the slaves will be started...

I still need some useful commands, as engine mangling (kill or load an 
agent), dumping the whole slave engines population, serializing the master 
and things like that... But now it's only a matter of time...

We need also a command to talk directly with slaves (ie "quote <master-id> 
<slave-id> ........."), but the semi-fixed structure of the command we have 
now could be a problem.

Moreover, I need to specialize the "print" method of the GDClient class to 
make it try to recover died connections transparently (i.e. dued to timeouts).

I put a "sync" flag in the SlaveDef class: if a slave engine gets an error of 
some kind (both hard, if the daemon falls or soft, if the engine gets an 
error in doing something). If an engine goes "out of sync", i would leave 
this situation to the user/client to handle. 

I also corrected a lot of small errors that I left behind in the hurry to 
have a working parallel algorithm. 

One last concern. When you compile this version, it should be better to use 
the -DPARANOID switch, althrough this is not needed:

host% CFLAGS="-DPARANOID" ./configure
host% make

this should work fine.

Bye,
Giancarlo.