high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Low-fidelity aerodynamic codes, including panel, lifting line and vortex lattice methods, are used in the preliminary aerodynamic studies in the early stages of the aircraft design and constitute an important and compute-intensive part of aircraft design process. This preliminary design phase is usually very time consuming as it involves parametric studies counting tens of Excellent code speed-ups were achieved for problems of medium to large size (≥ 2048 panels). As expected, the code speed-up for problems of small size was limited. Use of GPU acceleration is justified above certain problem size threshold. This threshold can be pushed higher by exploiting concurrent execution on GPU. Potential theory based low-fidelity aerodynamic codes can highly benefit from GPU acceleration. Panel methods, which are typically used for problems of large size (going to and above 20k panels), seem to be an especially good candidate.