PUGACE, a cellular Evolutionary Algorithm framework on GPUs
Nicolás Soca, Jose Luis Blengio, Martín Pedemonte, Pablo Ezzatti · 2010
Metaheuristics are used for solving optimization problems since they are able to compute near optimal solutions in reasonable times. However, solving large instances it may pose a challenge even for these techniques. For this reason, metaheuristics parallelization is an interesting alternative in order to decrease the execution time and to provide a different search pattern. In the last years, GPUs have evolved at a breathtaking pace. Originally, they were specific-purpose devices, but in a few years they became general-purpose shared memory multiprocessors. Nowadays, these devices are a powerful low cost platform for implementing parallel algorithms. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of PUGACE, a cellular Evolutionary Algorithm framework implemented on GPU. PUGACE was designed with the goal of providing a tool for easily developing this kind of algorithms. The experimental results when solving the Quadratic Assignment Problem are presented to show the potential of the proposed framework.