Open-source optimization algorithms for optical design

Abstract Driven by the growth of internet, commercial cloud computing now provides on-demand, massively parallel computational power. This cloud processing can be utilized for solving science and engineering problems. Relying on computationally intensive ray-tracing, optical design can greatly benefit from a cloud based optimization approach if suitable parallelizable optimization algorithms can be implemented. Commercial optical design packages have algorithms tuned for optical design. There are also various local and global optimization algorithms for scientific and engineering problems. In this paper, several general purpose, open-source local and global optimization algorithms are evaluated for a lens design problem. The results are compared to results from a commercial optical design package, and some algorithms are shown to give similar performance. This research provides valuable insight into different optimization algorithms and therefore is a first step for taking optical design from desktop computers to cloud computing in order to achieve massively parallel processing in system optimization.