title: GPUs, a new tool of acceleration in CFD: efficiency and reliability on smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods.
abstract: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a numerical method commonly used in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate complex free-surface flows. Simulations with this mesh-free particle method far exceed the capacity of a single processor. In this paper, as part of a dual-functioning code for either central processing units (CPUs) or Graphics Processor Units (GPUs), a parallelisation using GPUs is presented. The GPU parallelisation technique uses the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) of nVidia devices. Simulations with more than one million particles on a single GPU card exhibit speedups of up to two orders of magnitude over using a single-core CPU. It is demonstrated that the code achieves different speedups with different CUDA-enabled GPUs. The numerical behaviour of the SPH code is validated with a standard benchmark test case of dam break flow impacting on an obstacle where good agreement with the experimental results is observed. Both the achieved speed-ups and the quantitative agreement with experiments suggest that CUDA-based GPU programming can be used in SPH methods with efficiency and reliability.
authors.affiliation: EPHYSLAB Environmental Physics Laboratory, Universidade de Vigo, Ourense, Spain. alexbexe@uvigo.es
authors.forename: Alejandro C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Crespo
authors.forename: Jose M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Dominguez
authors.forename: Anxo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Barreiro
authors.forename: Moncho
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gómez-Gesteira
authors.forename: Benedict D
authors.initials: BD
authors.lastname: Rogers
mesh_terms: D000054:Acceleration; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D057446:Hydrodynamics; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D011312:Pressure; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014867:Water / Q000032:analysis
chemical_list: D014867:Water