Towards a Decentralized Architecture for Optimization

We introduce a generic framework for the distributed execution of combinatorial optimization tasks. Instead of relying on custom hardware (like dedicated parallel machines or clusters), our approach exploits, in a peer-to-peer fashion, the computing and storage power of existing, off-the-shelf desktops and servers. Contributions of this paper are a description of the generic framework, together with a first instantiation based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). Simulation results are shown, proving the efficacy of our distributed PSO algorithm in optimizing a large number of benchmark functions. ©2008 IEEE.