DEoptim in Parallel
Running DEoptim in parallel has been on the development team’s wishlist for awhile. It had not been a priority though, because none of us have personally needed it. An opportunity arose when Kris Boudt approached me about collaborating to add this functionality as part of a consultancy project for a financial services firm.
We were able to add and test the functionality within a week. The latest revision of DEoptim on R-Forge has the capability to evaluate the objective function on multiple cores using foreach. Very CPU-intensive problems will see speed increases in approximately linear time (less communication overhead).