Beyond Speedups: Hardware-Aware Evaluation of Evolutionary Algorithms on GPUs

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are increasingly executed on graphics processing units (GPUs) to exploit population-level parallelism. This shift changes the resource model under which EAs are designed and evaluated. However, many GPU-based EA studies still focus mainly on implementation-level speedup after porting CPU-oriented algorithms to GPUs, providing limited insight into how algorithmic mechanisms, function-evaluation (FE) budgets, population scales, and hardware utilization jointly affect optimization behavior. In response, this paper goes beyond speedup measurement and studies the scaling behavior of EAs on GPUs from a hardware-aware evaluation perspective. We evaluate 16 representative EAs on 30 benchmark problems across CPU and GPU platforms, covering single-objective optimization, multi-objective optimization, numerical benchmarks, and neuroevolution tasks. The study leads to four findings. First, GPU acceleration is highly heterogeneous across algorithms because different evolutionary mechanisms expose different degrees of batched computation, memory regularity, and synchronization. Second, FE-budgeted evaluation remains useful for measuring sample efficiency, but it provides only a limited observation window under GPU execution; time-budgeted evaluation is therefore necessary for assessing practical time-to-solution and long-horizon search behavior. Third, GPU effectiveness depends on scaling regimes induced by problem dimension and population size, where parallelism may be underutilized, effective, or saturated. Fourth, GPU execution makes very large populations practically affordable, and several evolutionary mechanisms can convert this increased population scale into improved optimization performance. These results indicate that GPU parallelism should not be treated only as a post hoc acceleration tool, but as part of the evaluation and design assumptions of scalable EAs.