Acceleration of a CFD code with a GPU

Issue title: Exploring Languages for Expressing Medium to Massive On-Chip Parallelism

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Jespersen, Dennis C.

Affiliations: NASA/Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA. Tel.: +1 650 604 6742; Fax: +1 650 604 4377; E-mail: Dennis.Jespersen@nasa.gov

Abstract: The Computational Fluid Dynamics code OVERFLOW includes as one of its solver options an algorithm which is a fairly small piece of code but which accounts for a significant portion of the total computational time. This paper studies some of the issues in accelerating this piece of code by using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The algorithm needs to be modified to be suitable for a GPU and attention needs to be given to 64-bit and 32-bit arithmetic. Interestingly, the work done for the GPU produced ideas for accelerating the CPU code and led to significant speedup on the CPU.

Keywords: GPU, CUDA, acceleration, OVERFLOW code

DOI: 10.3233/SPR-2010-0309

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 18, no. 3-4, pp. 193-201, 2010