PARAGenesis:

PARAGenesis is the result of a project implementing Genesis on the CM-200 in C*. It is an attempt to improve PERFORMANCE as much as possible without changing the behavior of the GENETIC ALGORITHM. Unlike the punctuated equilibria and local SELECTION models, PARAGenesis doesn't modify the genetic algorithm to be more parallelizable as these modifications can drastically alter the behavior of the algorithm. Instead each member is placed on a separate processor allowing initialization, evaluation and MUTATION to be completely parallel. The costs of global control and communication in selection and CROSSOVER are present but minimized as much as possible. In general PARAGenesis on an 8k CM-200 seems to run 10-100 times faster than Genesis on a Sparc 2 and finds equivalent solutions.

PARAGenesis includes all the features of serial Genesis plus some additions. The additions include the ability to collect timing STATISTICS, probabilistic selection (as opposed to Baker's stochastic universal sampling), uniform crossover and local or neighborhood selection. Anyone familiar with the serial implementation of Genesis and C* should have little problem using PARAGenesis.

PARAGenesis is available by FTP from ftp://ftp.aic.nrl.navy.mil/pub/galist/src/ga/paragenesis.tar.Z

DISCLAIMER: PARAGenesis is fairly untested at this point and may contain some bugs.

Michael van Lent, Advanced Technology Lab, University of Michigan, 1101 Beal Av., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Net: <vanlent@eecs.umich.edu>.