Acceleration of a 3D Euler solver using commodity graphics hardware

Abstract

The porting of two- and three-dimensional Euler solvers from a conventional CPU implementation to the novel target platform of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is described. The motivation for such an effort is the impressive performance that GPUs offer: typically 10 times more floating point operations per second than a modern CPU, with over 100 processing cores and all at a very modest financial cost. Both codes were found to generate the same results on the GPU as the FORTRAN versions did on the CPU. The 2D solver ran up to 29 times quicker on the GPU than on the CPU; the 3D solver 16 times faster. Copyright © 2008 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.