Distributed Evolutionary Computation using REST

Abstract: This paper analises distributed evolutionary computation based on the Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol, which overlays a farming model on evolutionary computation. An approach to evolutionary distributed optimisation of multilayer perceptrons (MLP) using REST and language Perl has been done. In these experiments, a master-slave based evolutionary algorithm (EA) has been implemented, where slave processes evaluate the costly fitness function (training a MLP to solve a classification problem). Obtained results show that the parallel version of the developed programs obtains similar or better results using much less time than the sequential version, obtaining a good speedup.