Magnetohydrodynamics simulations on graphics processing units
NAOC-MUST Collaborative Research Laboratory on Lunar and Planetary Exploration, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao SAR, China
arXiv:0908.4362v2 [physics.comp-ph] (30 Aug 2009)
@article{wong2009efficient,
title={Efficient magnetohydrodynamic simulations on graphics processing units with CUDA},
author={Wong, H.C. and Wong, U.H. and Feng, X. and Tang, Z.},
journal={Arxiv preprint arXiv:0908.4362},
year={2009}
}
Magnetohydrodynamics (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 authors’ knowledge, the first implementation to accelerate computation of MHD simulations on GPUs. Numerical tests have been performed to validate the correctness of our GPU MHD code. Performance measurements show that our GPU-based implementation achieves speedups of 2 (1D problem with 2048 grids), 106 (2D problem with 1024^2 grids), and 43 (3D problem with 128^3 grids), respectively, compared to the corresponding serial CPU MHD implementation.
November 6, 2010 by hgpu
