Parallel SharpNEAT

CREATED ISSUE: Change Experiment Plug-in Architecture

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:36:58 GMT

The way that experiments are loaded currently is to use the app.config file to specify a bunch of parameters. This isn't very elegant and should be improved to work similar to the WorkerGUI's architecture.

CREATED ISSUE: Variable Evaluations Per Worker Per Generation

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:35:03 GMT

Many distributed environments are composed of heterogeneous systems with varying performance capabilities. It would be nice if we could accommodate this property by allowing workers to specify how many workers they can handle, either directly or by some metric which can be scaled.

UPDATED WIKI: Home

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:08:06 GMT

Project Description
A distributed implementation of the SharpNEAT framework. Supports both regular and coevolutionary approaches. Provides a plug-in architecture and a GUI for worker nodes.

CREATED FEATURE: Add Workers During Experiments

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:07:10 GMT

The current release takes a list of worker nodes in the configuration file at startup and uses only those nodes for the entire experiment. Since this is a distributed environment, it would be nice if we had the ability to add a new worker mid-way through an experiment.

CREATED ISSUE: Fault Tolerance

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:03:36 GMT

Currently, if a worker disconnects before the experiment is finished, it will crash the master. This needs to be handled in a more elegant way by first alerting the Master's GUI that it has lost a worker and then having the master gracefully shift any incomplete work onto the remaining worker nodes.

CREATED RELEASE: ParaSharpNeat v1.0 (Jul 09, 2007)

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 18:00:31 GMT

This is the initial release. You will need to use the modified version of the SharpNEAT code (which is provided in this release). The modified version is necessary because things had to be declared Serializable before .NET Remoting could be used.

An example of the Max Experiment project refactored to work in a distributed form is provided.

To run a worker:
- Build the ParaSharpNeat project
- Run the Worker GUI
- Select an evaluator

To run the Master (looks just like standard SharpNEAT GUI):
- Build the modified SharpNEAT code
- Run the SharpNEAT GUI
- Select the experiment (example is "(Distributed) Max Function")

This release does not provide any fault tolerance nor does it provide support for adding additional workers after the experiment has begun. If either the worker or master closes prematurely, the other program's functionality is undefined.

Source code checked in

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:47:33 GMT

Source code checked in

tansey — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 17:37:42 GMT

First check-in