Scheduling using multiple swarm particle optimization with memetic features on graphics processing units

Abstract

We investigate the performance of a highly parallel Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm implemented on the graphics processing unit (GPU). In order to achieve this high degree of parallelism we implement a collaborative multi-swarm PSO algorithm on the GPU which relies on the use of many swarms rather than just one. We choose to apply our PSO algorithm against a real-world application: the task matching problem in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. Due to the potential for large problem sizes with high dimensionality, the task matching problem proves to be very thorough in testing the GPU’s capabilities for handling PSO. Our results show that the GPU offers a high degree of performance and achieves a maximum of 37 times speedup over a sequential implementation when the problem size in terms of tasks is large and many swarms are used.