Delays in Computing with Parallel Metaheuristics on HPC Infrastructure

Due to their structure, metaheuristics such as parallel evolutionary algorithms (PEA) are well suited to be run on parallel and distributed infrastructure, e.g. supercomputers. However, there are still many issues that are not well researched in this context, e.g. existence of delays in HPC-grade implementations of metaheuristics and how they affect the computation itself. The lack of this knowledge may expose the fact, that the power of supercomputers in this context may be not properly used. We want to focus our research on examining such white spots. In the paper we focus on giving the evidence for the existence of delays, showing the differences among them in different island topologies, try to explain their nature and prepare to propose dedicated migration operators considering these observations.