A co-evolutionary differential evolution algorithm for solving min-max optimization problems implemented on GPU using C-CUDA

Several areas of knowledge are being benefited with the reduction of the computing time by using the technology of graphics processing units (GPU) and the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) platform. In case of evolutionary algorithms, which are inherently parallel, this technology may be advantageous for running experiments demanding high computing time. In this paper, we provide an implementation of a co-evolutionary differential evolution (DE) algorithm in C-CUDA for solving min-max problems. The algorithm was tested on a suite of well-known benchmark optimization problems and the computing time has been compared with the same algorithm implemented in C. Results demonstrate that the computing time can significantly be reduced and scalability is improved using C-CUDA. As far as we know, this is the first implementation of a co-evolutionary DE algorithm in C-CUDA. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.