Methods for compressible fluid simulation on GPUs using high-order finite differences [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08900


We focus on implementing and optimizing a sixth-order finite-difference solver for simulating compressible fluids on a GPU using third-order Runge-Kutta integration. Since graphics processing units perform well in data-parallel tasks, this makes them an attractive platform for fluid simulation. However, high-order stencil computation is memory-intensive with respect to both main memory and the caches of the GPU. We present two approaches for simulating compressible fluids using 55-point and 19-point stencils. We seek to reduce the requirements for memory bandwidth and cache size in our methods by using cache blocking and decomposing a latency-bound kernel into several bandwidth-bound kernels. Our fastest implementation is bandwidth-bound and integrates $343$ million grid points per second on a Tesla K40t GPU, achieving a $3.6 \times$ speedup over a comparable hydrodynamics solver benchmarked on two Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 processors. Our alternative GPU implementation is latency-bound and achieves the rate of $168$ million updates per second.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Pekkila, M. Vaisala, M. Kapyla, et. al.
Fri, 28 Jul 17
20/48

Comments: 14 pages, 7 figures