Implementation and evaluation of 3D finite element method application for CUDA

Abstract

This paper describes a fast implementation of a FEM application on a GPU. We implemented our own FEM application and succeeded in obtaining a performance improvement in two of our application components: Matrix Assembly and Sparse Matrix Solver. Moreover, we found that accelerating our Boundary Condition Setting component on the GPU and omitting CPU-GPU data transfer between Matrix Assembly and Sparse Matrix Solver slightly further reduces execution time. As a result, the execution time of the entire FEM application was shortened from 44.65 sec on only a CPU (Nehalem architecture, 4 cores, OpenMP) to 17.52 sec on a CPU with a GPU (TeslaC2050). © 2013 Springer-Verlag.