A fair comparison of modern CPUs and GPUs running the genetic algorithm under the knapsack benchmark

Abstract

The paper introduces an optimized multicore CPU implementation of the genetic algorithm and compares its performance with a fine-tuned GPU version. The main goal is to show the true performance relation between modern CPUs and GPUs and eradicate some of myths surrounding GPU performance. It is essential for the evolutionary community to provide the same conditions and designer effort to both implementations when benchmarking CPUs and GPUs. Here we show the performance comparison supported by architecture characteristics narrowing the performance gain of GPUs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.