Platform impact on performance of parallel genetic algorithms: Design and implementation considerations

Many problems in the operations research field cannot be solved to optimality within reasonable amounts of time with current computational resources. In order to find acceptable solutions to these computationally demanding problems, heuristic methods such as genetic algorithms are often developed. Parallel computing provides alternative design options for heuristic algorithms, as well as the opportunity to obtain performance benefits in both computational time and solution quality of these heuristics. Heuristic algorithms may be designed to benefit from parallelism by taking advantage of the parallel architecture. This study will investigate the performance of the same global parallel genetic algorithm on two popular parallel architectures to investigate the interaction of parallel platform choice and genetic algorithm design. The computational results of the study illustrate the impact of platform choice on parallel heuristic methods. This paper develops computational experiments to compare algorithm development on a shared memory architecture and a distributed memory architecture. The results suggest that the performance of a parallel heuristic can be increased by considering the desired outcome and tailoring the development of the parallel heuristic to a specific platform based on the hardware and software characteristics of that platform.