A Highly-Parallel TSP Solver for a GPU Computing Platform

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is probably the most, widely studied combinatorial optimization problem and has become! a standard testbed for new algorithmic ideas. Recently the use of it CPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to accelerate non-graphics computations has attracted much attention due to its high performance and low cost. This paper presents a novel method to solve TSP with a GPC based on the CUDA architecture. The proposed method highly parallelizes a serial metaheuristic algorithm which is a genetic algorithm with the OX (order crossover) operator and the 2-opt local search. The experiments with an NVIDIA CePorce GTX285 GPU and a single core of 3.0 GHz Intel Core2 Duo E6850 CPU show that (air GPU: implementation is about up to 24.2 times faster than the corresponding CPU implementation.