Parallel PSO using MapReduce

Abstract

In optimization problems involving large amounts of data, such as web content, commercial transaction information, or bioinformatics data, individual function evaluations may take minutes or even hours. particle swarm optimization (PSO) must be parallelized for such functions. However, large-scale parallel programs must communicate efficiently, balance work across all processors, and address problems such as failed nodes. We present mapreduce particle swarm optimization (MRPSO), a PSO implementation based on the mapreduce parallel programming model. We describe MapReduce and show how PSO can be naturally expressed in this model, without explicitly addressing any of the details of parallelization. We present a benchmark function for evaluating MRPSO and note that MRPSO is not appropriate for optimizing easily evaluated functions. We demonstrate that MRPSO scales to 256 processors on moderately difficult problems and tolerates node failures.