Evaluation of Parallel Differential Evolution Implementations on MapReduce and Spark

Abstract

[Abstract] Global optimization problems arise in many areas of science and engineering, computational and systems biology and bioinformatics among them. Many research efforts have focused on developing parallel metaheuristics to solve them in reasonable computation times. Recently, new programming models are being proposed to deal with large scale computations on commodity clusters and Cloud resources. In this paper we investigate how parallel metaheuristics deal with these new models by the parallelization of the popular Differential Evolution algorithm using MapReduce and Spark. The performance evaluation has been carried out both in a local cluster and in the Amazon Web Services public cloud. The results obtained can be particularly useful for those interested in the potential of new Cloud programming models for parallel metaheuristic methods in general and Differential Evolution in particular.