Abstract The focus of this paper is on the development
and implementation of a genetic algorithm (GA)-based
software system using message passing interface (MPI)
protocol and library. A customized and improved form of
simple GA used in previous research (Chen et al. 1997;
Chen and Rajan 1998, 2000; Rajan et al. 1999) is parallelized.
This MPI-enabled version is used to find the solution
to finite element-based design optimization problems
in a network of workstations. Results show that an almost
linear speedup is obtained on homogenous hardware
cluster and, with a proper load-balancing strategy, on
heterogeneous hardware cluster.