Application of Graphics Processor Unit Computing Resources to Solution of Incompressible Fluid Dynamics Problems

The structure and memory organization of graphics processor units (GPUs) manufactured by NVIDIA and the use of CUDA programming technology to solve computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems is reviewed and discussed. The potential of using a general-purpose GPU to solve fluid dynamics problems is examined. The code optimization with the utilization of various memory types is considered. Some CFD benchmark problems focused on simulation of viscous incompressible fluid flows are solved on GPUs. Consideration is given to the application of the finite volume method and projection method. Programming implementation of various components of the computational procedure, solution of Poisson equation for pressure and multigrid method to solve the system of algebraic equations, is provided. By using meshes of varying resolutions and different techniques for dividing up the input data into blocks, the speedup of the GPU solution is compared to the CPU approach.