Building a Parallel Computer System for $18, 000 that Performs a Half Peta-Flop per Day

Techniques of evolutionary computation generally require significant computational resources to solve non-trivial problems of interest. Increases in computing power can be realized either by using a faster computer or by parallelizing the application. Techniques of evolutionary computation are especially amenable to parallelization. This paper describes how to build a 10-node Beowulf-style parallel computer system for $18,000 that delivers about a half petaflop (10 floating-point operations) per day on runs of genetic programming. Each of the 10 nodes of the system contains a 533 MHz Alpha processor and runs with the Linux operating system. This amount of computational power is sufficient to yield solutions (within a couple of days per problem) to 14 published problems where genetic programming has produced results that are competitive with human-produced results.