GA's in electromagnetics (on a Beowulf) (Score 2)

As an antenna engineer I use GA's all the time to optimize antennas, filters, polarizers, transitions and other microwave related stuff. The reason it works so good for these problems is that the search space is huge and filled with local minima. I have found that it's always a good thing to use a simpler algorithm such as a hill climber or some sort of gradient based method to really squezze the last few tenths out of the cost funtion though.
GA's are great in finding areas of interest but converge very slowly. Especially considering that electromagnetic simulation is very expensive in terms of memory and CPU.

Of course we run all our optimizations on a Beowulf!

http://www.endwave.com