Distributed BEAGLE was created to distribute the evolutionary process using the EC framework Open BEAGLE. Its key features are robustness, fault tolerance, adaptability for heterogeneous networks,and transparency for the user. Distributed BEAGLE uses the Master-Slave model to distribute data over the network.

When doing an Open BEAGLE EC application, just 3 little modifications to your code are needed to enable Distributed BEAGLE. There's two types of program that can be executed by using different configuration files. The first one evolves the population over one generation by applying Darwinian selection and genetic operators. It usually runs on the same computer as the master. The second one evaluates the individuals's fitness. The slaves can be eventually used as screen savers.

The master is called DAGS for DAGS is an Agile Grid Scheduler. It is not specific for a given evolutionary algorithm. DAGS uses dynamic adjustment of the size of sets of individuals that are sent to the slaves based on the recent history of the evaluation clients. If an evaluation client lags to return results, the data is redistributed to another evaluation client. There's a database in the master that insures data persistency.

For more informations to understand the basics and the maths behind Distributed BEAGLE and DAGS, refer to the article Distributed BEAGLE: an Environment for Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Computations

Distributed BEAGLE: a distributed evolutionary computations extension of Open BEAGLE and DAGS: DAGS is an Agile Grid Scheduler.

Copyright 2003-2004 by Marc Dubreuil, under the direction of Marc Parizeau and with the help of Christian Gagné.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

This project is done in the context of a research project at the Computer Vision and Systems Laboratory of Laval University.

We sincerely thanks Jacques Labrie, Helene Torresan and Frederic Jean for the conception of the prototype of Distributed BEAGLE.