Designing and Modeling a Browser-Based DistributedEvolutionary Computation System

Abstract

Web browsers have scaled from simple page-rendering engines to operating systems that include most services the lower OS layer has, with the added facility that applications can be run by just visiting a web page. In this paper we will describe the front and back end of a distributed evolutionary computation system that uses the browser's capabilities of running programs written in JavaScript. We will focus on two different aspects of volunteer computing: first, the pragmatic: where to find those resources, which ones can be used, what kind of support you have to give them; and then, the theoretical: how evolutionary algorithms can be adapted to an environment in which nodes come and go, have different computing capabilities and operate in complete asynchrony of each other. We will examine the setup needed to create a simple distributed evolutionary algorithm using JavaScript, with the intention of eventually finding a model of how users react to it by collecting data from several experiments featuring a classical benchmark function.

Browser-based Harnessing of Voluntary Computational Power

“…NodIO [59][60] was created as a framework for creating experiments solving problems using evolutionary/genetic algorithms. The project site's visitors see a HTML page showing graphs, links and information about an experiment, and running workers.…”

“…Fox et al [30] identified environmental protection, weather forecasting and economic growth projection as kind of problems which potentially may attract many volunteers. Whatever the problem is, its results should be freely accessible as both an ethical way to thank the public and as a way to popularize the project and attract more volunteers [59].…”

“…Similarly, application code could be obfuscated [68] [8]. We think, however, that if researchers want to use free resources provided by the volunteers, they should reciprocate with sharing their code and results, especially since it may building in build users' trust [59].…”

WebAL Comes of Age: A Review of the First 21 Years of Artificial Life on the Web

“…60 At the time, the required HTML5 canvas element for drawing graphics was not widely supported by browsers, but the situation has now greatly improved, as weʼll see in the next section. 66 In 2010, the Swedish creative studio B-Reel Creative, in collaboration with Google Creative Labs and the American music video director Chris Milk, designed a groundbreaking web-based video called The Wilderness Downtown. 67 The project, a Grand Prix winner at the 2011 Cannes Advertising Awards and recipient of a host of other awards, 68 was a trailblazer for many of the possibilities opened up by open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.…”

“…These include studies employing popular cloud-based storage services (specifically, Dropbox 136 and SugarSync 137 ) [67], and others implementing JavaScript-based evolutionary algorithms [66,65]. Other work has studied how the performance of different architectures of web-based evolutionary algorithms is affected when client nodes join and leave the cluster during an evolutionary run [51].…”