Parallelism

SMAC supports multiple workers natively via Dask. Just specify n_workers in the scenario and you are ready to go.

Note

Please keep in mind that additional workers are only used to evaluate trials. The main thread still orchestrates the optimization process, including training the surrogate model.

Warning

Using high number of workers when the target function evaluation is fast might be counterproductive due to the overhead of communcation. Consider using only one worker in this case.

Warning

When using multiple workers, SMAC is not reproducible anymore.

Running on a Cluster

You can also pass a custom dask client, e.g. to run on a slurm cluster. See our parallelism example.

Warning

On some clusters you cannot spawn new jobs when running a SLURMCluster inside a job instead of on the login node. No obvious errors might be raised but it can hang silently.

Warning

Sometimes you need to modify your launch command which can be done with SLURMCluster.job_class.submit_command.

cluster.job_cls.submit_command = submit_command
cluster.job_cls.cancel_command = cancel_command