PARNET: Distributed Realization of Genetic Algorithms in a Workstation Cluster

The population of parallel genetic algorithms (PGAs) can easily be split up to match the needs of a coarse grained parallelism. A cluster of interconnected workstations, seen as an MIMD-architecture, is the chosen hardware to express this kind of parallelism. A PGA implementation, as any other parallel algorithm, is bound to an execution environment, giving sustained support for its realization. Our execution environment, called PARNET, is constructed as a distributed server referred to as a base layer. The next higher level of abstraction is provided by the object oriented interface layer, allowing to construct the PGA layer on top of both. we introduce the PARNET conception, leading from the single machine operating environment to the distributed realization of a PGA.