Implementation and Benchmarking of Two-Dimensional Vortex Interactions on a Graphics Processing Unit

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Implementation and Benchmarking of Two-Dimensional Vortex Interactions on a Graphics Processing Unit

Chabalko, Christopher C. / Balachandran, Balakumar

A parallel single-instruction multiple data implementation of a two-level nested loop, which uses shared memory, is implemented via general-purpose computing on a graphics processing unit. The general-purpose computing on a graphics processing unit implementation is compared to MATLAB®, C, and other implementations of the same algorithm, which are primarily executed on the central processing unit. The general-purpose computing on a graphics processing unit implementation is determined to be decisively faster (80 times) than the fastest single threaded implementation. A linear algebra implementation is determined to consume excessive memory without a corresponding increase in computational performance. Although the speedup is hardware dependent, the general-purpose computing on a graphics processing unit algorithm exploits cache memory in a manner that is severely constrained on conventional multicore central processing units. For this reason, the nested loop described here is a natural fit for the single-instruction multiple data shared memory architecture. Details of the implementation are provided. The algorithm is applied to the simulation of vortex dynamics. In particular, it is applied to simulate the rollup of a vortex filament and carry out an unsteady simulation of a thin plate in ground effect. The cases presented here would be intractable to compute without the acceleration offered by the general-purpose computing on a graphics processing unit.