Large-scale and cooperative graybox parallel optimization on the supercomputer Fugaku

Abstract

We design, develop and analyze parallel variants of a state-of-the-art graybox optimization algorithm, namely Drils (Deterministic Recombination and Iterated Local Search), for attacking large-scale pseudo-boolean optimization problems on top of the large-scale computing facilities offered by the supercomputer Fugaku. We first adopt a Master/Worker design coupled with a fully distributed Island-based model, ending up with a number of hybrid OpenMP/MPI implementations of high-level parallel Drils versions. We show that such a design, although effective, can be substantially improved by enabling a more focused iteration-level cooperation mechanism between the core graybox components of the original serial Drils algorithm. Extensive experiments are conducted in order to provide a systematic analysis of the impact of the designed parallel algorithms on search behavior, and their ability to compute high-quality solutions using increasing number of CPU-cores. Results using up to 1024×12-cores NUMA nodes, and NK-landscapes with up to $10,000$ binary variables are reported, providing evidence on the relative strength of the designed hybrid cooperative graybox parallel search.