Solving the Permutation Problem Efficiently for Tabu Search on CUDA GPUs

Abstract

NVIDIA’s Tesla Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been used to solve various kinds of long running-time applications because of their high performance compute power. A GPU consists of hundreds or even thousands processor cores and adopts (Single Instruction Multiple Threading) SIMT) architecture. This paper proposes an approach that optimizes the Tabu Search algorithm for solving the Permutation Flowshop Scheduling Problem (PFSP) on a GPU. We use a math function to generate all different permutations, avoiding the need of placing all the permutations in the global memory. Experimental results show that the GPU implementation of our proposed Tabu Search for PFSP runs up to 90 times faster than its CPU counterpart.