When a deterministic search approach is too costly, such as for non-deterministic polynomial-hard problems, finding near-optimal solutions with approximation algorithms, such as the genetic algorithm, is the only practical approach to reduce the execution time. In this paper, we exploit the capability of graphics processing units (GPU), specifically Nvidia's CUDA platform, to accelerate the genetic algorithm by modifying the evolutionary operations to fit the hardware architecture. This has allowed us to achieve significant computational speedups compared to the non-GPU counterparts.