Is the island model fault tolerant?

In this paper, we present a study on the fault tolerance nature of the island model when applied to Genetic Algorithms. Parallel and distributed models have been extensively applied to GAs when researchers tackle hard problems. The idea is both to reduce computing time while also improving diversity of populations and therefore quality of solutions. Nevertheless, there are few works dealing with the problem of faults that are usually present when a distributed infrastructure is employed for running the parallel algorithm. This paper studies the behavior of the Island Model when faults appear on a parallel computer or a network of computers. Two benchmark problems have been employed, and good results obtained for each of them allow us to reliably consider Island Model as a fault tolerant parallel algorithm.

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