Evolutionary Computing Performance via MapReduce Parallel Processing

Evolutionary computation (EC) is a method that is ubiquitously used to solve complex computation. Examples of EC such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) are prevalent due to their efficiency and effectiveness. Despite these advantages EC suffers from long execution time due to its parallel nature. Therefore this research explores the prospect of speeding up the EC algorithms specifically GA and PSO via MapReduce (MR) parallel processing framework. MR is an emerging parallel processing framework that hides the complex parallelization processes by employing the functional abstraction of “map and reduce”. The performance of the parallelized GA via MR and PSO via MR are evaluated using an analogous case study to find out the speedup and efficiency in order to measure the scalability of both proposed algorithms. Comparisons between GA via MR and PSO via MR are also established in order to find which EC algorithm scales better via MR parallel processing framework. From the results and analysis obtained from this research it is established that both GA and PSO can be efficiently parallelized and shows good scalability via MR parallel processing framework.