Bees Algorithm for the Quadratic Assignment Problem on CUDA Platform

With the proliferation of graphics processing units (GPU) supporting general-purpose computing (GPGPU), many computationally demanding applications are being redesigned to exploit the capabilities offered by massively parallel computing platforms. This paper presents a Bees Algorithm (BA) for the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) implemented on the CUDA platform. The motivations for our work were twofold: firstly, we wanted to develop a dedicated algorithm to solve the QAP showing both time and optimization performance, secondly, we planned to check if the capabilities offered by popular GPUs can be exploited to accelerate hard optimization tasks requiring high computational power. The paper describes both sequential and parallel algorithm implementations, as well as reports results of tests.