The island model for evolutionary algorithms allows to delay the global convergence of the evolution process and encourage diversity. However, solving large size and time-intensive combinatorial optimization problems with the island model requires a large amount of computational resources. GPU computing is recently revealed as a powerful way to harness these resources. In this paper, we focus on the parallel island model on GPU. We address its re-design, implementation, and associated issues related to the GPU execution context. The preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and their capabilities to fully exploit the GPU architecture. Categories and Subject Descriptors