Practical CFD Simulations on Programmable Graphics Hardware using SMAC

The explosive growth in integration technology and the parallel nature of rasterization-based graphics APIs changed the panorama of consumer-level graphics: today, GPUs are cheap, fast and ubiquitous. We show how to harness the computational power of GPUs and solve the incompressible Navier-Stokes fluid equations significantly faster (more than one order of magnitude in average) than on CPU solvers of comparable cost. While past approaches typically used Stam's implicit solver, we use a variation of SMAC (Simplified Marker and Cell). SMAC is widely used in engineering applications, where experimental reproducibility is essential. Thus, we show that the GPU is a viable and affordable processor for scientific applications. Our solver works with general rectangular domains (possibly with obstacles), implements a variety of boundary conditions and incorporates energy transport through the traditional Boussinesq approximation. Finally, we discuss the implications of our solver in ligh...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: CGF
• Authors: Carlos Eduardo Scheidegger, João Luiz Dihl Comba, Rudnei Dias da Cunha
• Keywords: CGF 2005, Consumer-level Graphics, Explosive Growth, General Rectangular Domains