Shallow water simulations on multiple GPUs

Abstract

We present a state-of-the-art shallow water simulator running on multiple GPUs. Our implementation is based on an explicit high-resolution finite volume scheme suitable for modeling dam breaks and flooding. We use row domain decomposition to enable multi-GPU computations, and perform traditional CUDA block decomposition within each GPU for further parallelism. Our implementation shows near perfect weak and strong scaling, and enables simulation of domains consisting of up-to 235 million cells at a rate of over 1.2 gigacells per second using four Fermi-generation GPUs. The code is thoroughly benchmarked using three different systems, both high-performance and commodity-level systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.