Papers › Implementing a GPU-based parallel MAX-MIN Ant System
Implementing a GPU-based parallel MAX-MIN Ant System
Rafał Skinderowicz
The MAX-MIN Ant System (MMAS) is one of the best-known Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms proven to be efficient at finding satisfactory solutions to many difficult combinatorial optimization problems. The slow-down in Moore's law, and the availability of graphics processing units (GPUs) capable of conducting general-purpose computations at high speed, has sparked considerable research efforts into the development of GPU-based ACO implementations. In this paper, we discuss a range of novel ideas for improving the GPU-based parallel MMAS implementation, allowing it to better utilize the computing power offered by two subsequent Nvidia GPU architectures. Specifically, based on the weighted reservoir sampling algorithm we propose a novel parallel implementation of the node selection procedure, which is at the heart of the MMAS and other ACO algorithms. We also present a memory-efficient implementation of another key-component -- the tabu list structure -- which is used in the ACO's solution construction stage. The proposed implementations, combined with the existing approaches, lead to a total of six MMAS variants, which are evaluated on a set of Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) instances ranging from 198 to 3,795 cities. The results show that our MMAS implementation is competitive with state-of-the-art GPU-based and multi-core CPU-based parallel ACO implementations: in fact, the times obtained for the Nvidia V100 Volta GPU were up to 7.18x and 21.79x smaller, respectively. The fastest of the proposed MMAS variants is able to generate over 1 million candidate solutions per second when solving a 1,002-city instance. Moreover, we show that, combined with the 2-opt local search heuristic, the proposed parallel MMAS finds high-quality solutions for the TSP instances with up to 18,512 nodes.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
2 archive task tags without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections