Efficient use of parallelism in algorithmic parameter optimization applications

In the context of algorithmic parameter optimization, there is much room for efficient usage of computational resources. We consider the Opal framework in which a nonsmooth optimization problem models the parameter identification task, and is solved by a mesh adaptive direct search solver. Each evaluation of trial parameters requires the processing of a potentially large number of independent tasks. We describe and evaluate several strategies for using parallelism in this setting. Our test scenario consists in optimizing five parameters of a trust-region method for smooth unconstrained minimization.