Papers › pySOT and POAP: An event-driven asynchronous framework for surrogate optimization
pySOT and POAP: An event-driven asynchronous framework for surrogate optimization
David Eriksson, David Bindel, Christine A. Shoemaker
This paper describes Plumbing for Optimization with Asynchronous Parallelism (POAP) and the Python Surrogate Optimization Toolbox (pySOT). POAP is an event-driven framework for building and combining asynchronous optimization strategies, designed for global optimization of expensive functions where concurrent function evaluations are useful. POAP consists of three components: a worker pool capable of function evaluations, strategies to propose evaluations or other actions, and a controller that mediates the interaction between the workers and strategies. pySOT is a collection of synchronous and asynchronous surrogate optimization strategies, implemented in the POAP framework. We support the stochastic RBF method by Regis and Shoemaker along with various extensions of this method, and a general surrogate optimization strategy that covers most Bayesian optimization methods. We have implemented many different surrogate models, experimental designs, acquisition functions, and a large set of test problems. We make an extensive comparison between synchronous and asynchronous parallelism and find that the advantage of asynchronous computation increases as the variance of the evaluation time or number of processors increases. We observe a close to linear speed-up with 4, 8, and 16 processors in both the synchronous and asynchronous setting.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections