Evolutionary computing on consumer graphics hardware

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) are proven effective and robust in searching large varied spaces in a wide range of applications such as feature selection, electrical-circuit synthesis, and data mining. A growing demand from the multimedia and games industries has enabled graphics hardware companies to develop high-performance parallel graphics accelerators that resulted in the development of graphics processing unit (GPU). GPU handles rendering requests using a 3D graphics application programming interface (API). GPU lets processors communicate with any other processor directly, which enables to implement more flexible, fine grained EAs. A parallel EA can be implemented on consumer graphics cards found in many PCs. Evolutionary programming and genetic algorithms have been successfully applied to several numerical and optimization problems. EP requires mutation and is less computationally intensive than Genetic algorithm.