The sandpile scheduler: How self-organized criticality may lead to dynamic load-balancing

This paper studies a self-organized criticality model called sandpile for dynamically load-balancing tasks arriving in the form of Bag-of-Tasks in large-scale decentralized system. The sandpile is designed as a decentralized agent system characterizing a cellular automaton, which works in a critical state at the edge of chaos. Depending on the state of the cellular automaton, different responses may occur when a new task is assigned to a resource: it may change nothing or generate avalanches that reconfigure the state of the system. The abundance of such avalanches is in power-law relation with their sizes, a scale-invariant behavior that emerges without requiring tuning or control parameters. That means that large—catastrophic—avalanches are very rare but small ones occur very often. Such emergent pattern can be efficiently adapted for non-clairvoyant scheduling, where tasks are load balanced in computing resources trying to maximize the performance but without assuming any knowledge on the tasks features. The algorithm design is experimentally validated showing that the sandpile is able to find near-optimal schedules by reacting differently to different conditions of workloads and architectures

Dynamic and Partially Connected Ring Topologies for Evolutionary Algorithms with Structured Populations

This paper investigates dynamic and partially connected ring topologies for cellular Evolutionary Algorithms (cEA). We hypothesize that these structures maintain population diversity at a higher level and reduce the risk of premature convergence to local optima on deceptive, multimodal and NP-hard fitness landscapes. A general framework for modelling partially connected topologies is proposed and three different schemes are tested. The results show that the structures improve the rate of convergence to global optima when compared to cEAs with standard topologies (ring, rectangular and square) on quasi-deceptive, deceptive and NP-hard problems. Optimal population size tests demonstrate that the proposed topologies require smaller populations when compared to traditional cEAs

Designing a Self-organized Approach for Scheduling Bag-of-Tasks

This paper proposes a decentralized and self-organized agent system for dynamically load-balancing tasks arriving in the form of Bags-of-Tasks (BoTs) in large-scale decentralized systems. The approach is inspired by the emergent behavior of the sandpile model; a cellular automaton behaving at the edge of chaos. Depending on the state of the cellular automaton, rather different responses may occur when a new task is assigned to a resource. It may change nothing or generate avalanches that reconfigure the state of the system. The proportion between the abundance of avalanches and their sizes shows a power-law relation, a scale-invariant behavior that does not need to be tuned. That means that large –catastrophic– avalanches are very rare but small ones occur very often. Such a smart and emergent behavior fits well with the idea of non-clairvoyant scheduling, where tasks are load balanced into computing resources trying to maximize the performance but without assuming any knowledge on the tasks features. In order to study the viability of the approach, we have conducted an empirical experimentation which shows that the sandpile is able to find near-optimal schedules by reacting differently to different conditions of workloads and architectures

Cooperative Selection: Improving Tournament Selection via Altruism

This paper analyzes the dynamics of a new selection scheme based on altruistic cooperation between individuals. The scheme, which we refer to as cooperative selection, extends from tournament selection and imposes a stringent restriction on the mating chances of an individual during its lifespan: winning a tournament entails a depreciation of its fitness value. We show that altruism minimizes the loss of genetic diversity while increasing the selection frequency of the fittest individuals. An additional contribution of this paper is the formulation of a new combinatorial problem for maximizing the similarity of proteins based on their secondary structure. We conduct experiments on this problem in order to validate cooperative selection. The new selection scheme outperforms tournament selection for any setting of the parameters and is the best trade-off, maximizing genetic diversity and minimizing computational efforts

Pool vs. island based evolutionary algorithms: an initial exploration

This paper explores the scalability and performance of pool and island based evolutionary algorithms, both of them using as a mean of interaction an object store; we call this family of algorithms SofEA. This object store allows the different clients to interact asynchronously; the point of the creation of this framework is to build a system for spontaneous and voluntary distributed evolutionary computation. The fact that each client is autonomous leads to a complex behavior that will be examined in the work, so that the design can be validated, rules of thumb can be extracted, and the limits of scalability can be found. In this paper we advance the design of an asynchronous, fault-tolerant and scalable distributed evolutionary algorithm based on the object store CouchDB. We test experimentally the different options and show the trade-offs that pool and island-based solutions offer