Summarization: In this paper we discuss and analyze the FPGA-based implementation of an algorithm for the traveling salesman problem (TSP), and in particular of 2-Opt, one of the most famous local optimization algorithms, for Euclidean TSP instances up to a few hundred cities. We introduce the notion of "symmetrical 2-Opt moves" which allows us to uncover fine-grain parallelism when executing the specified algorithm. We propose a novel architecture that exploits this parallelism, and demonstrate its implementation in reconfigurable hardware. We evaluate our proposed architecture and its implementation on a state-of-the-art FPGA using a subset of the TSPLIB benchmark, and find that our approach exhibits better quality of final results and an...