GPU Calculations of Unsteady Viscous Compressible and Heat Conductive Gas Flow at Supersonic Speed

Abstract

The recent trend of using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for high performance computations is driven by the high ratio of price performance for these units, complemented by their cost effectiveness. Such kinds of units are increasingly being deployed not only as accelerators for supercomputer installations, but also in GPU-enabled nodes in Grid and Cloud installations. At first glance computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers match perfectly to GPU resources, because these solvers make intensive calculations and use relatively small memory. Nevertheless, there are scarce results about the practical use of this serious advantage of GPU over CPU, especially for calculations of viscous, compressible, heat conductive gas flows with double precision accuracy. In our work we present calculation of unsteady, viscous, compressible and heat conductive gas with double precision accuracy using GPU-enabled version of the algorithm SIMPLE-TS, written on standard OpenCL. As a test case we model the flow past a square in a microchannel at supersonic speed with Mach number $\mathrm{{M}}=2.43$ on AMD Radeon HD 7950 GPU and achieve 90 GFlops, which is 46 times faster than the CPU serial code run on Intel Xeon X5560.