Pymoo Parallelization Reference

Reference for parallel evaluation of expensive ElementwiseProblem instances.

When to Use

Use parallelization when _evaluate is the bottleneck (simulations, ML inference, external solvers). Pymoo evaluates one solution per _evaluate call for ElementwiseProblem; pass a runner to evaluate multiple solutions concurrently.

Requirements:

Subclass ElementwiseProblem (not vectorized Problem)
Set elementwise_evaluation=True (default for ElementwiseProblem)
Pass elementwise_runner to the problem constructor

Starmap Interface (Threads or Processes)

Uses Python's multiprocessing.Pool.starmap interface via StarmapParallelization.

python

import multiprocessing
from multiprocessing.pool import ThreadPool

from pymoo.algorithms.soo.nonconvex.ga import GA
from pymoo.core.problem import ElementwiseProblem
from pymoo.optimize import minimize
from pymoo.parallelization.starmap import StarmapParallelization


class MyProblem(ElementwiseProblem):
    def __init__(self, elementwise_runner=None, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(
            n_var=10, n_obj=1, xl=-5, xu=5,
            elementwise_runner=elementwise_runner,
            **kwargs,
        )

    def _evaluate(self, x, out, *args, **kwargs):
        out["F"] = (x ** 2).sum()


# Thread pool (shared memory; good for I/O-bound evaluation)
n_threads = 4
pool = ThreadPool(n_threads)
runner = StarmapParallelization(pool.starmap)
problem = MyProblem(elementwise_runner=runner)

result = minimize(problem, GA(), ("n_gen", 50), seed=1)
pool.close()

# Process pool (separate memory; good for CPU-bound evaluation)
n_processes = 4
pool = multiprocessing.Pool(n_processes)
runner = StarmapParallelization(pool.starmap)
problem = MyProblem(elementwise_runner=runner)

result = minimize(problem, GA(), ("n_gen", 50), seed=1)
pool.close()

Joblib Interface

Alternative using the joblib library:

python

from joblib import Parallel, delayed
from pymoo.parallelization.joblib import JoblibParallelization

runner = JoblibParallelization(lambda func, X: Parallel(n_jobs=4)(delayed(func)(x) for x in X))
problem = MyProblem(elementwise_runner=runner)

Install joblib if needed: uv pip install joblib

Notes

Always close the pool after minimize() completes
Process pools require picklable problem definitions (avoid lambdas in class bodies)
Parallelization speedup depends on evaluation cost vs. overhead
For vectorized problems (Problem subclass evaluating batches), implement batching inside _evaluate instead

Documentation: https://pymoo.org/parallelization/starmap.html