Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA

Details Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA

2009-08-30

arxiv.org/abs/0908.4362v3

Physics

Computational Physics

52 pages, 27 figures, 6 tables, 60 references, second revised manuscript for Computer Physics Communications

Scientific paper

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations based on the ideal MHD equations have become a powerful tool for modeling phenomena in a wide range of applications including laboratory, astrophysical, and space plasmas. In general, high-resolution methods for solving the ideal MHD equations are computationally expensive and Beowulf clusters or even supercomputers are often used to run the codes that implemented these methods. With the advent of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), modern graphics processing units (GPUs) provide an alternative approach to parallel computing for scientific simulations. In this paper we present, to the author's knowledge, the first implementation of MHD simulations entirely on GPUs with CUDA, named GPU-MHD, to accelerate the simulation process. GPU-MHD supports both single and double precision computation. A series of numerical tests have been performed to validate the correctness of our code. Accuracy evaluation by comparing single and double precision computation results is also given. Performance measurements of both single and double precision are conducted on both the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 (GT200 architecture) and GTX 480 (Fermi architecture) graphics cards. These measurements show that our GPU-based implementation achieves between one and two orders of magnitude depending on the used graphics card, problem size, and precision when comparing to the original serial CPU MHD implementation. In addition, we extend GPU-MHD to support the visualization of the simulation results and thus the whole MHD simulation and visualization process can be performed entirely on GPUs.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-621288