::abstract

An Asynchronous Hybrid Genetic-Simplex Search for Modeling the Milky Way Galaxy

Boleslaw Szymanski (Center for Pervasive Computing and Networking Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA)

This talk examines the use of a probabilistic simplex operator for asynchronous genetic search on the BOINC volunteer computing framework. The algorithm is used to optimize a computationally intensive function with a continuous parameter space: finding the optimal fit of an astronomical model of the Milky Way galaxy to observed stars. The asynchronous search using a BOINC community of over 1,000 users is shown to be comparable to a synchronous continuously updated genetic search on a 1,024 processor partition of an IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer. The probabilistic simplex operator is also shown to be highly effective and the results demonstrate that increasing the parents used to generate offspring improves the convergence rate of the search. Additionally, it is shown that there is potential for improvement by refining the range of the probabilistic operator, adding more parents, and generating offspring differently for volunteered computers based on their typical speed in reporting results. The results provide a compelling argument for the use of asynchronous genetic search and volunteer computing environments, such as BOINC, for computationally intensive optimization problems and, therefore, this work opens up interesting areas of future research into asynchronous optimization methods.

Dr. Bolesaw K. Szymaski is the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Founding Director of the Center for Pervasive Computing and Networking, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in 1976. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Aberdeen University in Scotland and on the faculty of the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Szymanski is an author and co-author of more than three hundreds scientific publications and an editor of three books. He is also an Editor-in-Chief of Scientific Programming and on the editorial boards of other journals. Dr. Szymanski is an IEEE Fellow and was a National Lecturer for Association for Computing Machinery. In 2003, he received the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award. Dr. Szymanski interests cover the broad area of distributed and parallel computer systems and algorithms. In the recent years he has focused on wireless and sensor networks. His research has been supported by the government and industry.