An optimized GPU implementation of a 2D free surface simulation model on unstructured meshes

This work is related with the implementation of a finite volume method to solve the 2D Shallow Water Equations on Graphic Processing Units (GPU). The strategy is fully oriented to work efficiently with unstructured meshes which are widely used in many fields of Engineering. Due to the design of the GPU cards, structured meshes are better suited to work with than unstructured meshes. In order to overcome this situation, some strategies are proposed and analyzed in terms of computational gain, by means of introducing certain ordering on the unstructured meshes. The necessity of performing the simulations using unstructured instead of structured meshes is also justified by means of some test cases with analytical solution. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.