Distributed Evaluator

[vbtcl]

This seems no longer to be true?

openevolve/configs/default_config.yaml

Line 159 in f596d6d

# Note: distributed evaluation is not yet implemented

[vbtcl]

or is this referring to multi machine?

[vbtcl]

What would a distributed evaluator even look like? Distribute via slurm? across some serverless endpoint? Generalizing this seems complicated...

[codelion]

The comment is still accurate - distributed evaluation across multiple machines is not implemented, and we're not planning to build our own distributed execution system.

Our philosophy is that OpenEvolve should rely on external systems for distributed evaluation rather than reinventing the wheel. There are already excellent frameworks for this (Slurm, Ray, Dask, Celery, serverless platforms, etc.), each with their own trade-offs and ecosystems.

What we should focus on is making it easy to write evaluators that integrate with these frameworks. For example:

• An evaluator that submits jobs to a Slurm queue and polls for results
• An evaluator that uses Ray to distribute work across a cluster
• An evaluator that calls serverless endpoints

This keeps OpenEvolve's core simple while letting users leverage whatever distributed infrastructure they already have. We're open to adding examples or documentation showing how to build evaluators that work with popular distributed frameworks.

If you have a specific framework in mind, we'd be happy to discuss what an integration might look like!