Eden's Bees: Parallelizing Artificial Bee Colony in a Functional Environment

Due to the proliferation of multicore computers, most users own hardware that allows to speedup the execution of programs by running them in parallel. However, in practice it is not trivial to take advantage of such parallel architectures, because the programmer needs to take care of too many low level details. This is also true in problems with a high degree of inherent parallelism, like many bioinspired metaheuristics. In this paper we simplify the parallelization of one of such metaheuristics, namely Artificial Bee Colony, by using a functional language, Eden, to implement a parallel skeleton to deal with it. Once the skeleton is defined, the user only needs to provide a concrete fitness function, while all the low level parallel details are done automatically by the skeleton.