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{{Infobox software
| name = Distributed Hardware Evolution Project
| logo = Dhep-logo.png
| screenshot =
| caption =
| description = DHEP was a completed BOINC-adjacent volunteer computing project at the University of Sussex that used an island-based coevolutionary genetic algorithm to synthesize self-checking digital hardware circuits for reliability-critical electronics.
| status = Discontinued
| category = Evolutionary Computing
| compute = CPU
| dependencies = None
| developer = Michael Garvie
| author = Michael Garvie
| sponsor = University of Sussex
| maintainer = None (project discontinued)
| released = {{Start date and age|2018|05|11}}
| completed =
| discontinued = Autumn 2019
| repository =
| programming language = Java (client)
| operating system = Windows, Linux, macOS
| size =
| stats as of =
| average performance =
| active users =
| total users =
| active hosts =
| total hosts =
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|http://dhep.ga/boinc/}}
| license =
}}

'''DHEP''' (the '''Distributed Hardware Evolution Project''') was a [[BOINC]]-adjacent volunteer computing project based in the Department of Informatics at the [[wikipedia:University of Sussex|University of Sussex]], England.<ref name="bcwiki">{{Cite web |title=Distributed Hardware Evolution Project/en |url=https://wiki.bc-team.org/index.php?title=Distributed_Hardware_Evolution_Project/en |website=BC-Wiki |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref> The project allowed volunteers to host an "island" running a population-based metaheuristic stochastic optimisation algorithm – specifically a [[wikipedia:genetic algorithm|genetic algorithm]] – in a coevolutionary setting, with the aim of automatically synthesising future super-reliable electronics of the kind used in autonomous vehicles, power stations, medical equipment, and aerospace systems.<ref name="boincstats">{{Cite web |title=Distributed Hardware Evolution Project (DHEP) |url=https://boinc.netsoft-online.com/forum/proj/1485/distributed-hardware-evolution-project-dhep/ |website=BOINC Combined Statistics |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref> As increasing numbers of human lives depend on correctly functioning hardware, the project framed its work as directly relevant to safety-critical engineering, while also using the resulting data on population dynamics to study migration rates, genetic diversity, and the mechanisms of genetic recombination more generally.<ref name="boincstats" /><ref name="tsbt">{{Cite web |title=DHEP - Distributed Hardware Evolution Project |url=https://tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9785 |website=The Scottish Boinc Team |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref>

The project was administered by [[wikipedia:Michael Garvie|Michael Garvie]], a University of Sussex researcher who had studied evolutionary approaches to self-checking hardware for over a decade before DHEP's launch.<ref name="arxiv">{{Cite arxiv |last1=Garvie |first1=Michael |last2=Husbands |first2=Phil |title=Automatic Synthesis of Totally Self-Checking Circuits |eprint=1901.07023 |class=cs.AR |year=2019 |url=https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07023}}</ref> DHEP entered public beta on 11 May 2018 and was suspended in autumn 2019 pending funding that never materialised.<ref name="steemit">{{Cite web |title=New BOINC Project - Distributed Hardware Evolution Project |url=https://steemit.com/boinc/@delta1512/new-boinc-project-distributed-hardware-evolution-project |website=Steemit |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref><ref name="bam">{{Cite web |title=Forum::New projects::Distributed Hardware Evolution Project (DHEP) |url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/11/12000,1 |website=BOINCstats/BAM! |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref>

[[File:Falmer House, University of Sussex.JPG|thumb|right|Falmer House at the University of Sussex, where DHEP was based within the Department of Informatics.]]

== History ==
DHEP grew directly out of Garvie's doctoral research at Sussex. His 2005 PhD thesis, ''Reliable Electronics through Artificial Evolution'', and an earlier paper co-authored with [[wikipedia:Adrian Thompson (computer scientist)|Adrian Thompson]], "Evolution of Self-diagnosing Hardware" (2003), had already demonstrated that [[wikipedia:evolutionary algorithm|evolutionary algorithms]] could design small self-testing circuits.<ref name="garvie2005">{{Cite book |last=Garvie |first=Michael |title=Reliable Electronics through Artificial Evolution |year=2005 |publisher=University of Sussex |type=PhD thesis}}</ref><ref name="garvie2003a">{{Cite conference |last1=Garvie |first1=M. |last2=Thompson |first2=A. |title=Evolution of Self-diagnosing Hardware |book-title=Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Evolvable Systems (ICES2003): From biology to hardware |editor=A. Tyrrell, P. Haddow, J. Torresen |volume=LNCS 2606 |pages=238–248 |publisher=Springer-Verlag |year=2003}}</ref> DHEP was conceived as a way to scale that earlier, small-scale work up to a distributed grid of volunteer processors, allowing much larger and more numerous "islands" of evolving circuit populations to run in parallel than would be feasible on Sussex's own hardware alone.

A forum poster who recalled an earlier, pre-BOINC incarnation of the project noted that it had folded once its original student contributor, referred to informally as "Miguel," finished his time at university, with the project restarting later once BOINC integration was implemented.<ref name="steemit" /> The BOINC-integrated version was announced and began exporting statistics to third-party BOINC statistics sites during 2018, at which point the project entered what its team described as a "production" state.<ref name="bam" /><ref name="anandtech1">{{Cite web |title=Distributed Hardware Evolution Project |url=https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/distributed-hardware-evolution-project.2546583/ |website=AnandTech Forums |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref>

DHEP was shut down suddenly in autumn 2019. In a message to volunteers, the project's administrator, signing as "Michael," explained that DHEP had to be suspended until further funding could be secured, thanking the BOINC community and volunteers for their contributions.<ref name="bam" />

== The evolutionary methodology ==
DHEP's underlying science goal was ''concurrent error detection'' (CED): adding hardware logic to a digital circuit so that it can signal an error as soon as one occurs, without waiting for external testing. A circuit with this property for a given fault set is described as ''totally self-checking'' (TSC) if it is both ''self-testing'' (every fault in the set is eventually signalled during normal operation) and ''fault-secure'' (no fault ever produces an incorrect output without an accompanying error signal).<ref name="arxiv" />

[[File:Xilinx Spartan FPGA die shot.jpg|thumb|left|A field-programmable gate array die. DHEP's genetic algorithm evolved digital logic circuit designs of this general kind, targeting a generic two-input-gate technology library.]]

Rather than using conventional, hand-designed CED techniques such as duplication-and-comparison or parity checking, DHEP searched for TSC circuit designs directly, using a genetic algorithm operating on populations of candidate circuits encoded as binary genotypes. Each individual in a population represented a complete circuit design, instantiated and evaluated in a digital logic simulator against several fitness criteria simultaneously: whether it computed the correct output function, whether it was self-testing, whether it was fault-secure, and how small (parsimonious) the resulting circuit was.<ref name="arxiv" />

For the output-function component of fitness, each candidate circuit's response <math>Q_j</math> at output <math>j</math> was compared with the desired response <math>Q_j'</math> across all output lines <math>q</math>, giving an overall function fitness

<math>f_f = \sum_{j=0}^{q-1} \frac{|corr(Q_j, Q_j')|}{q}</math>

with <math>f_f = 1</math> indicating a circuit that reproduces the target function exactly.<ref name="arxiv" /> Self-testing and fault-secure fitness were evaluated by simulating the circuit under every fault in a defined fault set and measuring how many faults or fault/input-word combinations failed to be correctly signalled, penalising unsignalled faults according to

<math>f_{ST} = \frac{1}{1 + u_f k_{ST}}</math> and <math>f_{FS} = \frac{1}{1 + u_i k_{FS}}</math>

where <math>u_f</math> and <math>u_i</math> count unsignalled faults and fault/input-word instances respectively.<ref name="arxiv" /> A circuit scoring the maximum on all three metrics was mathematically guaranteed to be TSC with respect to the fault set used.

=== Island-based coevolution ===
To exploit the volunteer computing grid, DHEP distributed this genetic algorithm using an island-based coevolutionary model. Each connected volunteer computer was assigned a location on a two-dimensional grid and ran its own independent, small, genetically converged population – an "island" – of 32 candidate circuit genotypes evolving over many generations, with mutation as the primary driver of variation.<ref name="arxiv" /> Individuals were periodically selected to migrate between islands, with the probability of a given destination island being chosen varying inversely with its grid distance from the source, allowing fit genetic material to diffuse across the whole population of islands while largely preserving genetic diversity within each one.<ref name="arxiv" /> Because islands could join or leave the grid as volunteer machines came online or dropped out, the algorithm was inherently tolerant of a dynamically changing number of participating hosts – a natural fit for a volunteer computing model. At its largest, the system described in the project's associated research paper made use of a grid of up to 150 workstations.<ref name="arxiv" />

== Client and credit system ==
Because DHEP predated its BOINC integration, its computational core remained a bespoke, Java-based application communicating with DHEP's own servers rather than a conventional BOINC science application; the Windows/Linux/macOS client was distributed under the name "Distributed Hardware Evolution Island."<ref name="bcwiki" /><ref name="steemit" /> BOINC-issued workunits functioned as long-running placeholder tasks of indefinite duration rather than discrete jobs to be completed: actual evolutionary progress was tracked server-side, and credit was granted through an hourly trickle-message system similar in spirit to that used by [[wikipedia:climateprediction.net|climateprediction.net]].<ref name="bcwiki" /><ref name="anandtech2">{{Cite web |title=Re: Distributed Hardware Evolution Project |url=https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/re-distributed-hardware-evolution-project.2550991/ |website=AnandTech Forums |access-date=2026-07-03}}</ref> A given task would effectively run "forever" from the client's point of view, terminating only when the project's science goal was updated on the server, which volunteers reported happened every few weeks.<ref name="anandtech1" /> DHEP tasks did not support checkpointing and offered no GPU, Android, Raspberry Pi, or NCI application variants.<ref name="bcwiki" />

[[File:Google self driving car at the Googleplex.jpg|thumb|right|Autonomous vehicles were cited by DHEP as an example application area for the super-reliable, self-checking hardware its algorithm aimed to design.]]

== Applications ==
DHEP framed concurrent error detection as increasingly important wherever hardware failure carries a direct risk to human safety, explicitly citing autonomous vehicles, power stations, medical equipment, and aerospace systems as target domains for the kind of low-overhead, self-checking circuitry its evolutionary process was designed to discover.<ref name="boincstats" /> The project's own results paper reported that its evolved circuits achieved TSC concurrent error detection using an average of only 23% of the overhead required by conventional duplication-based checking across a standard set of benchmark circuits, compared with roughly 69% for the best previously published techniques.<ref name="arxiv" />

== Scientific publications ==

=== Publications using BOINC-computed data ===
The following publication explicitly credits computation donated by the distributed computing community, corresponding to processing performed on the DHEP volunteer grid, in addition to time on the Grid'5000 research testbed:<ref name="arxiv" />

* {{Cite arxiv |last1=Garvie |first1=Michael |last2=Husbands |first2=Phil |title=Automatic Synthesis of Totally Self-Checking Circuits |eprint=1901.07023 |class=cs.AR |year=2019 |url=https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07023}}

=== Other project-related publications ===
These earlier works by DHEP's founder predate the project's 2018 launch and describe the precursor research from which DHEP's methodology was developed; they did not use BOINC- or DHEP-computed data:

* {{Cite book |last=Garvie |first=Michael |title=Reliable Electronics through Artificial Evolution |year=2005 |publisher=University of Sussex |type=PhD thesis}}
* {{Cite conference |last1=Garvie |first1=M. |last2=Thompson |first2=A. |title=Evolution of Self-diagnosing Hardware |book-title=Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Evolvable Systems (ICES2003): From biology to hardware |editor=A. Tyrrell, P. Haddow, J. Torresen |volume=LNCS 2606 |pages=238–248 |publisher=Springer-Verlag |year=2003}}
* {{Cite conference |last1=Garvie |first1=M. |last2=Thompson |first2=A. |title=Evolution of Combinational and Sequential On-line Self-diagnosing Hardware |book-title=Proc. 2003 NASA/DoD Conf. on Evolvable Hardware |editor=J. Lohn, R. Zebulum, J. Steincamp, D. Keymeulen, A. Stoica, M. Ferguson |pages=167–173 |publisher=IEEE Computer Society |year=2003}}

== See also ==
* [[BOINC]]

== External links ==
* {{URL|http://dhep.ga/boinc/|DHEP project site}} (offline since project discontinuation)
* {{URL|https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07023|"Automatic Synthesis of Totally Self-Checking Circuits" on arXiv}}
* {{URL|https://wiki.bc-team.org/index.php?title=Distributed_Hardware_Evolution_Project/en|DHEP entry on the BC-Team wiki}}

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Discontinued BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Evolutionary computing]]
[[Category:University of Sussex]]

Distributed Hardware Evolution Project - Revision history

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