Component Object Based Single System Image Middleware for Metacomputer Implementation of Genetic Programming on Clusters

We present a distributed component-object model (DCOM) based single system image middleware (SSIM) for metacomputer implementation of genetic programming (MIGP). MIGP is aimed to significantly improve the computational performance of genetic programming (GP) exploiting the inherent parallelism in GP among the evaluation of individuals. It runs on costeffective clusters of commodity, non-dedicated, heterogeneous workstations. Developed SSIM represents these workstations as a unified virtual resource and addresses the issues of locating and allocating the physical resources, communicating between the entities of MIGP, scheduling and load balance. Adopting DCOM as a communicating paradigm offers the benefits of software platformand network protocol neutrality of proposed implementation; and the generic support for the issues of locating, allocating and security of the distributed entities of MIGP. Presented results of experimentally obtained speedup characteristics show close to linear speedup of MIGP for solving the time series identification problem on cluster of 10 W2K workstations.