Research

GECCO 2010 is getting ready to open July 7th at Portland (Oregon). But GECCO does not sleep and the 2011 edition is gearing up to take the torch after Portland. There is currently an announcement “GECCO 2011: Call for New Frontiers Track Proposals”. The deadline is June 30th, and you can get more information at http://goo.gl/m4my or at the public GECCO 2011 public announcements Wave (embedded below). You can follow GECCO 2011 on Twitter at @GECCO2011, join the group at GECCO 2011 on FaceBook or just Wave with GECCO 2011. ...

Today I finished migrating the LCS & GBML Central site from its original URL (http://lcs-gbml.ncsa.uiuc.edu) to a more permanent and stable home located at http://gbml.org. The original site is already currently redirecting the trafic to the new site, and it will be doing so for a while to help people transition and update bookmarks and feed readers. I have introduced a few changes to the functionality of the original site. Functional changes can be mostly summarized by (1) dropping the forums section and (2) closing comments on posts and pages. Both functionalities, rarely used in their current form, have been replaced by a simpler public embedded Wave reachable at http://gbml.org/wave. The goal, provide people in the LCS & GBML community a simpler way to discuss, share, and hang out. About the feeds being aggregated, I have revised the list and added the feeds now available of the table of contents from ...

I just uploaded the technical report of the paper we put together for CEC 2010 on how we can scale up eCGA using a MapReduce approach. The paper, besides exploring the Hadoop implementation, it also presents some very compelling results obtained with MongoDB (a document based store able to perform parallel MapReduce tasks via sharding). The paper is available as PDF. Technical report Abstract: This paper shows how the extended compact genetic algorithm can be scaled using data-intensive computing techniques such as MapReduce. Two different frameworks (Hadoop and MongoDB) are used to deploy MapReduce implementations of the compact and extended com- pact genetic algorithms. Results show that both are good choices to deal with large-scale problems as they can scale with the number of commodity machines, as opposed to previous ef- forts with other techniques that either required specialized high-performance hardware or shared memory environments. ...

You may find the slide deck and the abstract for the presentation we delivered today at the “Data-Intensive Research: how should we improve our ability to use data” workshop in Edinburgh. Abstract This talk will focus a highly scalable data intensive infrastructure being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at the University of Illinois and will introduce current research efforts to tackle the challenges presented by big-data. Research efforts include exploring potential ways of integration between cloud computing concepts—such as Hadoop or Meandre—and traditional HPC technologies and assets. These architecture models contrast significantly, but can be leveraged by building cloud conduits that connect these resources to provide even greater flexibility and scalability on demand. Orchestrating the physical computational environment requires innovative and sophisticated software infrastructure that can transparently take advantage of the functional features and to negotiate the constraints imposed by this diversity of computational resources. Research conducted during the development of the Meandre infrastructure has lead to the production of an agile conductor able to leverage the particular advantages in the physical diversity. It can also be implemented as services and/or in the context of another application benefitting from it reusability, flexibility, and high-scalability. Some example applications and an introduction to the data intensive infrastructure architecture will be presented to provide an overview of the diverse scope of Meandre usages. Finally, a case will be presented showing how software developers and system designers can easily transition to these new paradigms to address the primary data-deluge challenges and to soar to new heights with extreme application scalability using cloud computing concepts. ...

If you are planning to submit a paper for the 2010 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the deadline is January 13, 2010 (and now extended to January 27th). You can find more information at the GECCO 2010 calendar site.